‘And a woman having an issue of blood twelve years, who had spent all her living on physicians, and could not be healed of any, came behind him, and touched the border of his robe, and immediately the issue of her blood stanched.'
And in that crowd was a woman who ought not to have been there, for she was permanently ritually unclean (Leviticus 15:25). She had a flow of vaginal blood that never stopped flowing. She had spent a fortune on doctors, and now she was in poverty and all hope had gone. But she had heard of Jesus, and no doubt disguised, crept into the crowd around Him. She knew that what she was about to do was unforgivable. For when she touched this prophet she would be making Him ritually unclean, together with all the people around her who touched her as well. Religiously she was human dynamite. But her desperation overrode everything else and quietly and surreptitiously she made her way through the crowd and touched Him. ‘She only touched the hem of His garment, as to His side she stole, amidst the crowd that gathered around Him, and straightway she was whole.' (She may in fact have touched one of the tassels that every Jewish man had on his garment - Numbers 15:38). And immediately she sensed the change in her. For the first time in years the flow had dried up. She was healed.
‘A woman having an issue of blood twelve years.' Compare the previous verse, ‘an only daughter of about twelve years of age'. This suggests a deliberate emphasis on the number twelve which is a number regularly representing the twelve tribes of Israel. Israel was both dying like the daughter and unclean like the woman. We can compare here Ezekiel 16:6; Ezekiel 16:9 mentioned above where Jerusalem is depicted as being like a child covered with blood from conception to marriageable age, i.e. about twelve years. But Jesus was here both to cleanse and to restore to life if only she would respond.