Numbers 19:22, commentary and pictures

The word soul in the verse means a person or individual, so that a person who touches something unclean becomes unclean until evening. Contact with a dead body brought ceremonial uncleanness. That uncleanness was transmissible, for whatever the unclean person touched became unclean, and the person who touched that thing remained unclean until evening. The red heifer was offered to provide purification for those made unclean in this way, and its ceremony was distinct from most offerings, for the heifer was taken outside the camp to an uncultivated, rough valley, killed by the elders, and its blood was sprinkled toward the temple seven times before the whole animal was burned with cedar wood, hyssop, and scarlet. The offering also served when a person was found slain and the killer was unknown, when the nearest city's elders washed their hands over the heifer and prayed that innocent blood not be charged against them.

The ritual carried defilement to everyone who handled it, so that even the priest who sprinkled the blood and the clean man who gathered the ashes and the one who sprinkled the ashes mixed with water had to wash his clothes and remain unclean till evening, while the unclean person on whom the water was sprinkled was cleansed by those same ashes. The red heifer sacrifice was performed once for all for the whole people, yet it did not give indiscriminate purification to all, but made a provision that each impure person had to avail himself of singly in order to be freed from personal impurity. The chapter describes exceptions to the rule that purification in the typical law required blood, concerning cases in which uncleanness was handled without blood. Such purification without blood was for defilement coming from misfortune, sickness, accidents, or other fleshly causes rather than sin, and this does not contradict the need for blood to remit sin, for sin incurs death and blood, as life, makes atonement by giving life for life. The sprinkling of the ashes of the heifer for those defiled, sanctifying to the cleanness of the flesh, did not take place in the second apartment of the earthly sanctuary.

The sin-offering contained two lives, the innocent life of the victim and the imputed sinful life of the offerer, so the same blood both conveyed defilement to the sanctuary and cleansed the sinner. The red heifer especially represented Christ, whose sacrifice was for the whole world, not only Israel, and whose blood offers hope and salvation even to those deeply sunk in sin. Christ on the cross was made sin and suffered as the vilest of sinners, yet at the same time by virtue of His own pure life cleansed sinners as He cleansed the thief. As the provision of the heifer had to be applied individually, so Christ tasting death for all men still requires each person to go through individually what He did for all. Its place alongside the blood of goats and bulls as the type of the blood of Christ cleansing the conscience from dead works to serve the living God shows that Christ as high priest of the good things to come through the greater and more perfect tabernacle ministers in the heavenly sanctuary as a whole, including the holy place, and not in the most holy place alone. In spirit the verse forbids religious customs that require pressing the lips against the dead, and obeying this Bible instruction prevents disease such as tuberculosis, for the ceremonial laws given to Israel are the best code of health laws in the world.