1And the LORD spoke to Moses and to Aaron, saying, 2“This is the statute of the teaching that the LORD has charged, saying, ‘Speak to the Israelites, that they take you a perfect red cow that has no blemish and on which no yoke has been put. 3And you shall give her to Eleazar the priest, and he shall take her outside the camp and she shall be slaughtered before him. 4And Eleazar the priest shall take of her blood with his finger and sprinkle toward the front of the Tent of Meeting from her blood seven times. 5And the cow shall be burned in his sight, her hide and her flesh and her blood together with her dung he shall burn. 6And the priest shall take cedarwood and hyssop and crimson stuff and fling them into the burning of the cow. 7And the priest shall wash his garments and bathe his flesh in water, and then he may come into the camp, and the priest will be unclean till evening. 8And he who burns her shall wash his garments in water and bathe his flesh in water and will be unclean until evening. 9And a clean man shall gather the cow’s ashes and set them outside the camp in a clean place, and it shall become for the community of Israelites a thing to be kept as riddance water; it is an offense offering. 10And he who gathers the cow’s ashes shall wash his garments and will be unclean until evening, and it shall be for the Israelites and for the sojourner who dwells in their midst a perpetual statute. 11He who touches a dead body of any human person shall be unclean seven days. 12He shall cleanse himself with the ashes on the third day and on the seventh day he will be clean, and if he does not cleanse himself on the third day, on the seventh day he will not be clean. 13Whosoever touches a dead body, a human being who has died, and does not cleanse himself, he defiles the LORD’s Tabernacle, and that person shall be cut off from Israel, for riddance water was not thrown upon him. He is unclean; his uncleanness is still in him.
14“‘This is the teaching about a person who dies in a tent. Whosoever comes into the tent and all that is in the tent will be unclean seven days. 15And every open vessel that has no tight lid on it will be unclean. 16And whosoever in the open field touches a corpse slain by sword or a dead body or a human bone or a grave will be unclean seven days. 17And they shall take for the unclean person from the dust of the burning of the offense offering, and fresh water shall be put into it in a vessel. 18And a clean person shall take a hyssop and dip it in water and sprinkle it on the tent and on all the vessels and on the people who were there and on him who touched the bone or the corpse or the dead person or the grave. 19And the clean person shall sprinkle it over the unclean person on the third day and on the seventh day, and he shall cleanse him on the seventh day, and he shall wash his garments and bathe in water, and he will be clean at evening. 20And a man who becomes unclean and does not cleanse himself, that person will be cut off from the midst of the assembly for he has defiled the LORD’s sanctuary, riddance water has not been thrown on him, he is unclean. 21And it shall become a perpetual statute for them, and he who sprinkles the riddance water shall wash his garments, and he who touches the riddance water will be unclean until evening. 22And whatever the unclean person touches will be unclean, and the person who touches it will be unclean until evening.’”
CHAPTER 19 NOTES
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2. a perfect red cow that has no blemish. The traditional rendering of parah as “heifer” is not warranted by the Hebrew, which in no way suggests that the beast is not mature. The red color appears to be associated with the importance of blood in the purification ritual that follows, an association reinforced by the phonetic overlap in Hebrew between dam, “blood,” and ʾadom, “red.”
on which no yoke has been put. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “on which no yoke has gone up.” The manifest idea is that the cow should not have been used for profane purposes.
3. she shall be slaughtered. The Hebrew uses an impersonal third-person masculine verb, “one shall slaughter her,” a fairly common equivalent of the passive. (The same form occurs at the beginning of verse 5.) As verse 8 makes clear, some person other than Eleazar the priest does the burning: the priest himself is kept at a certain distance from this procedure, supervising it (the force of “before him” in this verse).
4. her blood. As elsewhere, blood has a purifying function, serving as what Jacob Milgrom calls a “spiritual detergent.” The blood is sprinkled “toward” the Tent of Meeting because the whole ritual takes place at a considerable distance from it, outside the camp.
9. it is an offense offering. This comment is a kind of gloss. A normal offense offering would be sacrificed on the altar to expiate an offense. These ashes mixed with water serve a similar function of ridding the person of contamination. Both the corpse and the act of transgression are imagined as imparting a polluting physical residue, a kind of miasma, that has to be cleansed.
11. He who touches a dead body. Baruch Levine has made a persuasive case that the “hidden agenda” of this whole section is an attempt to discourage the cult of the dead. Sundry Ugaritic and Mesopotamian documents suggest a widespread cult of the dead (especially, royal dead) in the ancient Near East, and there are some hints of its presence in the Bible proper. These laws, then, argue that the dead, far from being objects of worship and propitiation, are a source of contamination, and that even accidental contact with corpse or grave or bone requires a rite of purification. Without such purification, the defiled person is proscribed from the community (verse 13).
12. the ashes. The Hebrew says only “it,” but the antecedent of the pronoun has been substituted for clarity in the translation. (The Hebrew for “ashes” is singular.)
14. all that is in the tent will be unclean. The ritual impurity exuded by the corpse contaminates everything within the enclosed space of the tent, except for tightly sealed vessels. Although there is a similarity here to the modern understanding of the mechanism of contagion in highly communicable diseases, the similarity is a coincidence flowing from the ancient conception of impurity as a seeping miasma.
16. a corpse slain by sword or a dead body or a human bone. Any dead body, whether a victim of the sword or of natural causes, or any remnant of a dead body, is equally contaminant. The stress on “human,” as some of the medieval commentators note, indicates that no distinction is intended between Israelite and non-Israelite corpses.
17. the dust. Dust and ashes, because they are a set collocation in biblical usage (see Genesis 18:27), exhibit a certain degree of interchangeability, though ʿafar does usually indicate dust of the earth and ʾefer the residue of burning.