Hukkat 5786
The Red Heifer
This week we are reading Parashat Hukkat, Numbers 19:1–22:1. Yes, Num 22:1 is at the end of Hukkat and not at the beginning of Parashat Balak, another case where the Christian division of the chapters and the Jewish division of the parshiyot are misaligned.
That’s something that perhaps we can discuss another time — because Hukkat is the parashah that has Numbers 19, the famous passage about the red heifer. A פָרָ֨ה אֲדֻמָּ֜ה para aduma is really nothing more than a red cow, as the NJPS translates it; “red heifer” comes to us from the King James Version.
It certainly sounds like a more important ritual if you call this a heifer rather than just a cow, but that too is not what I want to focus on this week. Let me simply add that a “heifer” (per the Oxford English Dictionary) is “a young cow, specifically one that is over one year of age but has not yet calved.” That’s not specified in our chapter but does seem to be implied.
What I want to look at this week is a different question, one that asks about the bigger picture. What’s this chapter doing here? Numbers 18 discusses the sacred “gifts,” that is, the parts of the sacrifices brought by ordinary Israelites that must be given to the priests and the Levites; in the first verse of Numbers 20, Miriam dies. In the course of that chapter Aaron too will die and — though it’s never mentioned explicitly — four decades will pass and the generation of the wilderness joins Miriam and Aaron in death.
Why then this commercial interruption for the ritual of the red heifer? For the answers, I’m going to turn (this week) to the traditional commentators in the Numbers volume of my Commentators’ Bible. Don Isaac Abarbanel, the finance minister of Spain under Isabella and Ferdinand, who, with all the other Jews, was exiled in August of 1492 — I like to think that he authorized Columbus’s expense voucher before he left the country — spent the rest of his life writing commentary. He had a lot of questions to pose about Numbers 19:
• What is special about this commandment that it should be called a “ritual law” (v. 2)?
• Why must it be a cow and not a bull?
• Why must it be red?
• Why must it be a cow “on which no yoke has been laid”?
• Why is Eleazar, rather than his father Aaron, instructed to perform this ritual?
• Why is it slaughtered “outside the camp” (v. 3)?
• Why is the fat of the cow not offered on the altar?
• Why must “cedar wood, hyssop, and crimson stuff” (v. 6) be thrown into “the fire consuming the cow”?
• Why are “the priest” (v. 7), “he who performed the burning” (v. 8), and “he who gathers up the ashes” (v. 10) all made unclean by these procedures?
• Why is this called “water of lustration” (v. 9) rather than “water of the cow” or “of the cow ash”?
• If this cow is “a purification from sin” (v. 9, OJPS), why is it treated so differently from any other sin offering?
• How can this water cleanse one “who touches the corpse of any human being” (v. 11)?
• How can this water cleanse those who are unclean, when it defiles the clean people who prepare it?
• Why does the chapter not end with “The Israelites did so, as the LORD had spoken to Moses,” or “Eleazar did so, as Moses had commanded him,” as the Torah usually says?
But his very first question is ours, too:
Why are the instructions about the red cow recorded only now after Korah’s rebellion, when it was needed as soon as the Tabernacle went into operation? (Indeed, Jewish tradition says these commandments were given back then.)
The purpose of the red heifer, as you may have deduced from his questions, is to facilitate the cleansing of ritual impurity, a cleansing that is basic to the sacrificial system described in Leviticus and even more so simply to the existence of the Tabernacle, a home for God’s Presence among the Israelites. You could not approach the Tabernacle if you were unclean! The red heifer is turned into red heifer ash (read all about that in Numbers 19), which is used with “water of lustration” (v. 9) for ritual cleansing.
I have a vivid memory of the Jewish community of Boston having arranged a celebration in the Massachusetts statehouse on Beacon Hill. They had no way of knowing that Tip O’Neill, the Boston pol who had been Speaker of the House of Representatives, would die that weekend, and that his body would be lying in state in the rotunda. Tip — may he rest in peace — had to be hustled out of the building, because amongst the Jews who would be celebrating were kohanim, those whose ancestors had been priests in Temple times, who to this today cannot be under the same roof as a dead body.
Why? Because we no longer have the ash of a red heifer with which the impurity communicated by a corpse can be made clean. So — again — Abarbanel asks: Why do we only find out about the red heifer now, in Numbers 19, when we needed it as soon as the Tabernacle became sacred?
In fact, the commentators don’t really give many good explanations of why this chapter occurs when it does. Here is the comment of Abraham ibn Ezra, another Iberian who ended up in Europe, four centuries before Abarbanel:
This passage too was said in the wilderness of Sinai, when God said, “Instruct the Israelites to remove from camp … anyone defiled by a corpse” (5:2); remember that we have already encountered “some men who were unclean by reason of a corpse and could not offer the passover sacrifice” (9:6). It is given here, following ch. 18, because it is another aspect of the priestly ritual.
As we’ve seen, chapter 18 discusses the priestly gifts; it’s a reasonable assumption that it does so because in chapter 17 the famous miracle with the almond staff has just proven that Aaron is indeed the one who was chosen to be priest and not his cousin Korah or anyone else.
Nahmanides, the 13th-c. Spanish commentator who sometimes looks at Ibn Ezra with (let’s say) a bit of a jaundiced eye — adds just slightly more of an explanation:
This chapter completes the rules for priests, but it is included here after the priestly gifts of ch. 18 (rather than in Leviticus) to emphasize that the Israelites require the services of a priest for their ritual purification.
He too is implicitly also saying this is happening after the Korah rebellion.
Now we turn to Hizkuni, a northern French commentator and follower of the school of Rashi and Rashi’s grandson Rashbam:
This was on the 1st of Nisan, the same day that the Tabernacle was set up; the cow was burnt on the next day so that they could be clean in order to offer the passover sacrifice.
That is, he dates our chapter to when it would have been necessary but doesn’t really explain why it’s found in the Torah only now. Abarbanel, who asked the question, did have to give an answer — he structured his commentary as answers to the questions he posed. He says this:
In fact, Moses prepared the first cow on that day (when he himself was still the High Priest). But now, in the 40th year, the Holy One foresaw that as a result of the battles to conquer the land many Israelites would become contaminated by corpses, and the ashes of the cow prepared by Moses would not suffice. Notice that we are not told that Eleazar “did as the Lord commanded,” as this was spoken on the day the Tabernacle was set up; the point was that this should be done when (eventually) necessary.
On that original 1st of Nisan, Moses himself was still serving in lieu of the high priest; Aaron had not yet been inaugurated. I said earlier that in Numbers 20, after our red heifer chapter, somehow 38 years go by without us noticing; Abarbanel says that’s already true here in Numbers 19. Only now, as a result of the battles east of the Jordan, would there be so many Israelites contaminated by corpse impurity that they would run out of the ashes of the cow originally prepared by Moses. This “ritual law” was spoken on that original 1st of Nisan but did not have to be carried out until now.
It’s true that in the fortieth year — where we will be in Numbers 20 or, if Abarbanel is correct, where we already are here in Numbers 19 — the Israelites are getting ready to conquer the land of Canaan. But if we are in the fortieth year, that means something else has happened: All the people older than twenty years old who came out of the land of Egypt (except for Caleb, Joshua, Moses and Miriam and Aaron) are dead.
That a lot of dead people, to be precise, 600,000 dead men of military age, not to mention their wives. (The children are not necessarily dead, but presumably many of the women would be.) There’s a lot of death to deal with now and that, I believe, is why the red heifer chapter has to happen before Numbers 20, when we wake up from this wilderness dream and discover that we are in the fortieth year and are about to be plunged back into the reality of a battle for the land of Canaan.
Next week, it is on to Parashat Balak (not Parashat Bil’am!). See you then.
