Numbers19chapter 19

Numbers 19:1-2

The victim is female, red, and one that has never worn a yoke, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown observe that this is the only sacrifice in the law whose colour is prescribed. Clarke notes that the people at large bring her, since the rite is provided for the whole community rather than for one man's offence. Verse 2 calls it the ordinance of the law and then gives no reason for a single detail of it, and Rashi's note on this verse takes the word rendered ordinance as marking a decree issued without its ground. Gill reports Aben Ezra placing the instruction back at Sinai beside Numbers 5:2 and the water of purifying at 8:7, while the chapter as it stands follows Korah.

Numbers 19:3-4

The heifer is handed to Eleazar rather than to Aaron, and Barnes gives the reason that the work defiles the man who performs it, which the high priest could not carry. She is killed outside the camp and burned there, and Hebrews 13:11-13 takes up that pattern when it says Jesus suffered without the gate. Her blood never reaches the altar. Eleazar sprinkles it seven times toward the front of the tent from where he stands, and Henry reads that sprinkling toward the sanctuary as the thing that gives the rite its standing.

Numbers 19:5-6

She is burned entire, skin and flesh and dung, and the text adds her blood to the list, which Leviticus 4:11-12 does not say of the sin offering burned outside the camp. Cedar wood, hyssop and scarlet go into the fire with her, the same three used at the cleansing of a leper in Leviticus 14:4-6 and on the leprous house at 14:49-52. Everything the rite will later use ends up in the ash, so one animal is reduced to a substance that keeps and travels.

Numbers 19:7-8

The priest who has just made the means of cleansing washes his clothes, bathes, and stays unclean until evening, and so does the man who burned her. Henry states the reversal plainly, that they were themselves unclean, as if the pollution laid upon them continued to cleave to them. Wesley in his Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament reads it of the imperfection of the Levitical priesthood, where the priest is defiled by his own work. The chapter builds the reversal into the rite and offers no account of why the clean are made unclean in the making of a cleansing.

Numbers 19:9-10

A clean man gathers the ash and lays it up outside the camp in a clean place, kept for the congregation, so one animal supplies a nation for years at a time. Hebrews 9:13 names this by name when it speaks of the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, which puts the link to Christ in the New Testament's own words rather than in a reading laid on the text. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown pass on the report of Jewish writers that a heifer was burned yearly, while the Mishnah tractate Parah, compiled about AD 200, preserves a dispute over whether seven or nine were ever burned from Moses onward. The gatherer is defiled like the rest, and the statute binds the stranger living among them as much as the Israelite.

Numbers 19:11-12

Touching a dead body puts a man outside the camp life for seven days, and Barnes points at one practical effect, that bodies were buried early rather than left in the open for the beasts. The remedy runs on a clock, sprinkling on the third day and on the seventh, and the man who misses the third is still unclean on the seventh. Clarke works the Hebrew of purify himself, yithchatta bo, literally he shall sin himself with it, since the verb behind sin also carries the sense of removing sin and of making a sin offering.

Numbers 19:13-14

A man who leaves himself unpurified defiles the tabernacle without going near it, and the sentence on him is to be cut off from Israel. The reason given is the omission itself, because the water of separation was not sprinkled upon him. Verse 14 widens the defilement to a whole tent when a man dies in it, taking in everyone who comes through the door and everything already inside. A priest or a Levite who touched a corpse was barred from service for a week, which is why readers of Luke 10:31-32 have long set this law beside the two men who pass by on the far side of the man left half dead.

Numbers 19:15-16

An open vessel with no covering bound on it is unclean, and Gill records the older Jewish reading, in the Targum of Jonathan, in Rashi and in Maimonides, that this holds of earthen vessels, which soak up what touches them and are broken rather than scoured at Leviticus 11:33. Verse 16 gives the reach of the law in open country, a man slain with a sword, a dead body, a bone, or a grave. Marking graves followed from this, so that no one picked up defilement unawares, and Luke 11:44 turns the practice into a charge when Jesus calls the scribes and Pharisees as graves which appear not, and the men that walk over them are not aware of them.

Numbers 19:17-18

Ashes from the burnt heifer go into a vessel and running water is poured on them, water taken living from a spring or a stream rather than standing water out of a cistern. A clean person takes hyssop to sprinkle it, the same plant that carried the blood to the doorposts at Exodus 12:22 and the one David asks for at Psalm 51:7. What is sprinkled is the tent, the vessels and the people, so the house is treated along with the man who was in it.

Numbers 19:19-20

No priest appears in this half of the rite. Any clean person sprinkles on the third day and the seventh, and the unclean man then washes his clothes, bathes himself, and is clean at evening. The man who refuses is cut off, and the charge laid against him is the neglect rather than the original contact, since the water stood ready and he would not have it. Henry puts it as the wound not being fatal so much as the contempt of the remedy.

Numbers 19:21-22

The statute is made perpetual with the reversal written into it, since the man who sprinkles the water washes his clothes afterward and the man who touches it is unclean until evening. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown hold that the purifying power sits in the divine appointment rather than in the mixture. Verse 22 states the traffic of defilement in one direction, that whatever the unclean man touches becomes unclean. Haggai 2:11-13 puts that very question to the priests and gets the same answer, that holy flesh does not make other things holy by contact while a man defiled by a dead body makes what he touches unclean.