Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Red Heifer
Numbers 19:1-22
1 Yahweh spoke to Moses and to Aaron, saying, · WEB
An animal is burned outside the camp and its ashes make a water that cleanses death, and everyone who prepares it becomes unclean.
The rite is unlike anything else in the law, and every stage of it is odd.
The animal is a red heifer without spot, in which is no defect, and which was never yoked Numbers 19:2 — a female, never worked, and the only sacrifice in Scripture specified by color.
It is killed outside of the camp Numbers 19:3, not at the altar. Cedar, hyssop and scarlet are thrown into the fire, and the whole animal is burned — skin, meat, blood and dung Numbers 19:5–6. Nothing is eaten and nothing is kept except ash.
The ash is stored outside of the camp in a clean place, mixed with running water as needed, and used to cleanse anyone defiled by contact with a dead body Numbers 19:9 Numbers 19:11–12. One heifer produces enough for years, so a single death provides a remedy that keeps.
And then the feature that has puzzled readers for as long as the passage has been read.
Everyone involved in making the water becomes unclean by making it. The priest who sprinkles the blood shall be unclean until the evening Numbers 19:7. The man who burns her, unclean Numbers 19:8. The man who gathers the ashes, unclean Numbers 19:10. And the man who sprinkles the water on somebody else is made unclean by it Numbers 19:21.
The same substance cleanses the defiled and defiles the clean. Nothing else in the law behaves like that, and the text offers no explanation.
What can be observed is what the water is for. It answers the one uncleanness that everybody eventually incurs and that no one can avoid — touching a corpse — and the duty of burying the dead is a duty. So a permanent remedy is provided for an unavoidable condition, and the cost of providing it falls on those who prepare it rather than on those who need it.
The New Testament takes up the comparison and does so on the passage's own terms, arguing from the ashes of a heifer sprinkling those who have been defiled to a blood that cleanses the conscience Hebrews 9:13–14.
And the sanction is severe: a man who does not cleanse himself defiles Yahweh's sanctuary and is cut off Numbers 19:20. In a camp of that size, in the years when the sentence was being carried out, somebody was dying every day.
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