Numbers 19

## Summary Numbers 19 gives the statute of the red heifer: an unblemished animal is slaughtered outside the camp, its blood sprinkled toward the Tent of Meeting, and its remains burned with cedar wood, hyssop, and scarlet material. The resulting ashes are mixed with water to create a purification agent for anyone defiled by contact with a corpse, applied on the third and seventh days. ## Key words - *chukat* ("statute of", H2708) — construct form linking "statute" to "the law" (*ha-Torah*, H8451), marking this as a fixed, defined ordinance rather than general instruction. - *para* ("heifer", H6510) with *aduma* ("red", H0122A) and *temima* ("unblemished", H8549G) — three feminine singular terms stacked to specify a precise ritual animal: color, physical wholeness, and (via the next clause) freedom from labor. - *nogea'* ("one who touches", H5060) — a qal participle used repeatedly (vv. 11, 13, 16, 18, 22) to designate "the toucher" as an ongoing legal category, not a one-time act. - *yitchatta'* ("he will purify himself", H2398) — hithpael (reflexive) imperfect, showing the purification is something the person undergoes/performs upon himself, not merely receives. - *mei niddah* ("water of impurity/separation", H5079) — construct phrase naming the ash-water mixture itself; the noun *niddah* denotes the condition of impurity being addressed. ## What the text says The chapter opens with *va-yedabber Yahweh* ("and Yahweh spoke", H1696G/H3068G), the standard narrative formula introducing legal speech, addressed jointly to Moses and Aaron (v.1). Verse 2 immediately labels the content *chukat ha-Torah* — "statute of the law" — a phrase using two overlapping legal terms (H2708 and H8451) that together frame the ritual as a fixed prescription. The heifer specifications in v.2 use a chain of relative clauses (*asher*, H0834A) each negating a defect: no blemish (*ein bah mum*), never yoked (*lo alah aleiha ol*) — grammatically building the animal's qualification through successive negative conditions rather than a single adjective. The sequence of priestly actions (vv.3–9) is carried by *vav*-consecutive perfects (e.g., *ve-natatem*, *ve-hotzi*, *ve-shachat*) — a chain construction typical of legal/procedural Hebrew, where each verb picks up the temporal thread from the previous one, producing a strict step-by-step ordering: handing over, removing, slaughtering, sprinkling, burning. Verses 11–22 shift to casuistic (case) law, opening with the participle *ha-nogea'* ("the one who touches") functioning almost as a legal subject-heading, repeated for different defiling objects — a corpse, a bone, a grave, a slain body in a field. The purification timing is doubled and mirrored in v.12: *ba-yom ha-shelishi u-vayom ha-shevi'i* ("on the third day and on the seventh day"), with the negated counterpart repeated verbatim if the person fails to comply, showing the law's binary structure of compliance/consequence through exact syntactic repetition. ## Differences between versions In v.3, the LXX adds εἰς τόπον καθαρόν ("to a clean place"), a phrase not present in the Hebrew, which the Vulgate also omits. In v.9, the LXX renders the Hebrew *mei niddah* ("water of impurity", H5079) as ὕδωρ ῥαντισμοῦ ("water of sprinkling"), and calls it ἅγνισμα ("purification"), while the Hebrew's own gloss is *chattat hi'* ("it is a sin offering", H2403H) — the Vulgate follows this sense with "pro peccato vacca combusta est." In v.14, the Hebrew *ohel* ("tent", H0168G) is rendered by the LXX as οἰκία ("house"), a shift in the domestic term the Vulgate does not make, retaining "tabernaculo/tentorium."