a discharge: fluid flowing from a person's sexual organs, the kind of flow that makes that person ceremonially unclean
This word appears in only one chapter of the Bible. All thirteen uses fall in Leviticus 15, a body of law about fluids that leave the body through the sexual organs. The word names the flow itself, the fluid and its running, not the person it comes from and not the ceremonial uncleanness that follows.
Leviticus 15 works through four situations, and this word covers three of them:
- a man's long-running discharge, which the chapter treats as an illness
- a woman's monthly bleeding, which is ordinary and expected
- a woman's bleeding that keeps going past its normal time
The fourth situation, a man's ordinary release of semen, is the one the chapter never describes with this word. It uses a term of its own for that (שְׁכָבָה).
So this is not a word for sickness. A woman's monthly period carries the same name in Leviticus 15:19, and nothing there is presented as wrong with her. What all these flows share is that something is leaving the body from the place where life is passed on, and in Israel's law that set a person outside the ordinary state of purity for a fixed time. Each case ends the same way: washing, a stretch of waiting, and for the two long-running conditions an offering brought to the sanctuary.
The chapter is unusually careful about physical detail. Leviticus 15:3 says the man is in this condition whether the fluid runs freely or his body is blocked up, since either way the flow is there. The Hebrew even sets the noun beside the verb it comes from, so Leviticus 15:25 reads literally that the woman flows a flow, a doubling that presses the point rather than adding anything new. Centuries later the Gospel writers describe a woman who had bled for twelve years using the plain Greek word for a flow (ῥύσις), the same word Greek Bibles use to render this one; she is living in the situation Leviticus 15:25 sets out.