Mikvah - meaning and origins

Mikvah - origins

The word means a "collection" – generally, a collection of water, as we first find in the creation story – ‘u’l’mikveh hamayim kara yamim – the collection of water [God] called Seas’ (Genesis 1:10).

So a mikvah is understood as a body of water including a natural, free-flowing source (mayim chayim – living waters’).  This might include a river or the sea but for privacy and convenience, a mikvah (pl. mikva’ot) is usually an indoor pool which is fed partially from ‘mayim chayim’ of some sort.

Torah contains many references to regaining spiritual purity after various sorts of bodily emissions: menstruation, ejaculation, discharges and weeping wounds.  Usually these require a physical cleansing (such as washing the clothes), and then a full immersion, sometimes, as in Leviticus 15:13, specifically in ‘Mayim Chayim’, ‘living’ water.   It is from these texts that the formal procedure of immersion was developed, and traditionally used by Jewish women after menstruation or childbirth and before marriage, by Jewish men to achieve ritual purity, and for utensils to be used for food, to render them ‘kosher’.