🔢WEB · Numbers 19:3
What does Numbers 19:3 mean?
"You shall give her to Eleazar the priest, and he shall bring her outside of the camp, and one shall kill her before his face."
— Numbers 19:3 (World English Bible)
Surrounding context
Yahweh spoke to Moses and to Aaron, saying,
“This is the statute of the law which Yahweh has commanded. Tell the children of Israel to bring you a red heifer without spot, in which is no defect, and which was never yoked.
You shall give her to Eleazar the priest, and he shall bring her outside of the camp, and one shall kill her before his face.
Eleazar the priest shall take some of her blood with his finger, and sprinkle her blood toward the front of the Tent of Meeting seven times.
One shall burn the heifer in his sight; her skin, and her meat, and her blood, with her dung, shall he burn.
The priest shall take cedar wood, hyssop, and scarlet, and cast it into the middle of the burning of the heifer.
Explanation
Numbers 19:3 gives a specific instruction within a larger set of laws about ceremonial purification. The verse says that a red heifer — described earlier in the chapter as a cow without defect or blemish that has never been yoked for work — is to be handed over to Eleazar the priest. He is then to lead the animal outside the camp, and someone (not necessarily Eleazar himself) is to slaughter it in his presence. The heifer's blood and ashes would later be used to make a special water of purification for cleansing people who had become ceremonially unclean, particularly through contact with a dead body.
The context is the wilderness period after Israel had received the law at Sinai and was journeying toward the Promised Land. God had given Moses and Aaron detailed instructions for maintaining the ritual purity of the camp, since Israel was meant to live as a holy people in the presence of a holy God. Death, in this system, was a major source of uncleanness because it represented the corruption and brokenness that entered the world through sin. Anyone who touched a corpse, or was in a tent where someone died, became unclean and needed a
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