Corpse Uncleanness and a Clean Camp

Of all the kinds of uncleanness in the Torah, the heaviest was death. It spread the farthest, and its cleansing needed the water of purification, sprinkled on the third day and on the seventh.

The claim this chapter answers is the one we met in the last chapter, pressed a little harder: “The laws about corpses and camps were ancient superstition. People who did not understand disease made up rituals to calm their fears. Yeshua touched the dead, which proves those rules no longer matter.”

To answer it, we will read what the Torah commands about the dead, then a page from the history of medicine, and then what Yeshua actually did when He touched the bier of a dead man.

Seven Days for the Dead

Numbers 19:11-13 He that touches the dead, even any soul (nephesh נֶפֶשׁ neh'-fesh) of a man (adam אָדָם aw-dawm'), shall be unclean seven days. He shall purify himself with it on the third day and on the seventh day, and he shall be clean; but if he does not purify himself on the third day and on the seventh day, he shall not be clean. Everyone that touches the dead, the soul (nephesh) of the man (adam) that dies, and does not purify himself, has defiled the tabernacle (mishkan מִשְׁכָּן mish-kawn') of the LORD; and that soul (nephesh) shall be cut off from Israel; because the water of impurity was not dashed upon him, he shall be unclean; his uncleanness is yet upon him.

The one who touched a dead body was to be sprinkled with the water of purification on the third day and on the seventh, and if he refused, he “has defiled the tabernacle (mishkan) of the LORD.” His uncleanness reached beyond his own body to the dwelling place of God.

Numbers 19:16 And everyone that touches, upon the face of the field, one slain with a sword, or a dead one, or a bone of a man (adam), or a grave, shall be unclean seven days.

Not only a body but even a bone or a grave made a person unclean for seven days, and the cleansing ended with water.

Numbers 19:19 And the clean shall sprinkle upon the unclean on the third day and on the seventh day; and on the seventh day he shall purify him; and he shall wash his garments, and bathe in the water, and shall be clean at evening.

The uncleanness of death also spread. Whatever the unclean person touched became unclean as well (Numbers 19:22). When the prophet Haggai put the question to the priests, they knew the answer at once.

Haggai 2:13 And Haggai said, If one who is unclean by a dead body (nephesh) touches any of these, shall it become unclean? And the priests answered and said, It shall become unclean.

In Haggai 2:12, the prophet had shown that holiness does not pass from one thing to another by touch, but uncleanness does.

For that reason the priests were guarded most strictly of all.

Leviticus 21:1-3 And the LORD said to Moses: Say to the priests, the sons of Aaron, and you shall say to them: For a soul (nephesh) none shall defile himself among his people; except for his kin who is near to him: for his mother, and for his father, and for his son, and for his daughter, and for his brother; and for his sister, the virgin who is near to him, who has not belonged to a man (ish אִישׁ eesh): for her he may defile himself.

Only for his closest family could a priest make himself unclean for the dead. Those who served nearest to the Holy One were to stay farthest from death.

A Doctor in Vienna

History offers a sobering picture of why this mattered.

In 1847, in the great hospital of Vienna, a physician named Ignaz Semmelweis noticed something terrible. The hospital had two maternity wards. In one, the mothers were attended by doctors and medical students, who often came straight from dissecting corpses; in the other, they were attended by midwives. In the doctors’ ward, mothers were dying of childbed fever at a far higher rate.

No one yet knew that germs cause disease, but Semmelweis made the doctors wash their hands in chlorinated lime before they touched a mother, and the deaths fell from about one in ten to one or two in a hundred. The medical world of his day mocked him for it.

The Torah had told Israel more than three thousand years earlier that contact with the dead made a person unclean for seven days, that whatever he touched became unclean, and that he must be cleansed with water (Numbers 19:11-22). A people who obeyed Numbers 19 would never have walked from a corpse to a mother in childbirth without washing. The commandment did not need a microscope to be right.

The Healer Who Touched the Bier

Luke takes us to the town of Nain.

Luke 7:12-15 As He drew near to the gate of the city, behold, a man who had died was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow; and a sizeable crowd from the city was with her. And when the Lord saw her He was moved with splanchnizomai σπλαγχνίζομαι splangkh-nid'-zom-ahee(deep-compassion) for her and said to her, "Do not weep." And He came up and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still; and He said, "Young man, I say to you, arise." And the dead man sat up and began to speak, and He gave him to his mother.

By Numbers 19 the dead make unclean whoever touches them, and “everything that the unclean touches shall be unclean” (19:22). Yet when Yeshua “came up and touched the bier,” the uncleanness of death did not pass to Him. His life passed to the dead, and “the dead man sat up and began to speak.”

Haggai had shown that uncleanness flows into what is clean. At Nain the flow ran the other way, from the Holy One into death itself. That does not make Numbers 19 empty, and Yeshua Himself used the Torah’s own picture to rebuke hypocrisy.

Matthew 23:27 Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness.

The word for “uncleanness” here is akatharsia ἀκαθαρσία ak-ath-ar-see'-ah. A tomb may be whitewashed and beautiful on the outside, but whoever touches it becomes unclean, as Numbers 19:16 says of “a grave.” Far from mocking the Torah’s commands about the dead, Yeshua took His picture from them.

The Camp Shall Be Holy

The Torah’s care reached all the way to the latrine.

Deuteronomy 23:13-15 And a hand shall be to you outside the camp, and you shall go out there, outside; And a peg shall be to you upon your weapon; and it shall be, when you sit down outside, you shall dig with it, and you shall turn back and cover your excrement. For the LORD your God walks in the midst of your camp, to deliver you and to give your enemies before you; therefore your camp shall be holy, that he may not see in you a nakedness of a thing and turn away from after you.

(YLV Deuteronomy 23:13-15, Masoretic verse order) The commands themselves are plain: a place outside the camp, a peg carried with one’s weapons, a hole dug, and the waste covered. But the reason the Torah gives reaches far higher: “For the LORD your God walks in the midst of your camp … therefore your camp shall be holy.”

The same command keeps the camp healthy and keeps the camp holy. God gives the same reason when He commands that the unclean be sent outside the camp, “that they not defile their camps, in the midst of which I am dwelling” (Numbers 5:3). Holiness reaches into the simplest habits of daily life.

I Am the LORD Your Healer

At Marah, three days after the Red Sea, God gave Israel a promise with His name in it.

Exodus 15:26 And he said, "If you will diligently listen to the voice of the LORD your God, and do what is right in his eyes, and give ear to his commandments (mitzvot מִצוָה mits-vaw'), and keep all his statutes (chuqqim חֹק khoke), all the disease which I put on Egypt I will not put on you; for I am the LORD your healer."

In the Hebrew of “I am the LORD your healer,” the word for healer is rophekha, from rapha רָפָא raw-faw', to heal. The promise is built on a condition: “If you will diligently listen … and give ear to his commandments (mitzvot), and keep all his statutes (chuqqim), all the disease which I put on Egypt I will not put on you.” The promise of health is joined to listening and keeping.

Deuteronomy 7:15 And the LORD will turn aside from you all sickness; and all the evil diseases of Egypt which you knew, He will not put upon you, but will put them upon all who hate you.

Moses repeats the promise on the edge of the land. No one is made right with God by washing his hands or burying his waste; a sinner is saved by grace, through faith, in Yeshua’s blood. But the God who saves is also the God who heals, and He joined His promise of health to the statutes He gave.

When the Healer came in the flesh, He did what no one else could do. He touched the leper and the bier of the dead, and the uncleanness ran from them instead of to Him.

Yet the Torah’s uncleanness does not end with the body. The Greek word that the Septuagint uses for an unclean animal in Leviticus, akathartos ἀκάθαρτος ak-ath'-ar-tos, is the word the Gospels use for a spirit, and the Torah says that a land can be so defiled that it vomits out its people. That is the second branch of uncleanness, and it runs from the land of Canaan to the fall of Babylon.