#Numbers 19:1-10
The red heifer
Truly one of the weirdest obsessions of the millennialist movement, but it’s also true that, as with some other stuff in P, there’s no particularly good explanation for why this is a thing. Why a red heifer? Why a heifer at all? Who knows.
The red heifer
Truly one of the weirdest obsessions of the millennialist movement, but it’s also true that, as with some other stuff in P, there’s no particularly good explanation for why this is a thing. Why a red heifer? Why a heifer at all? Who knows.
Ritually, it’s no so different from the one for cleansing the person with skin disease back at the beginning of Lev 14. Same basic ingredients: blood, hyssop, cedar, crimson. Same idea: mix it all and you get a mixture that cleans not the sanctuary but the actual person.
Though we haven’t even gotten in this section to what this mixture cleanses a person from, we know from its very existence and makeup that it’s gotta be something serious. This is high-level impurity we’re dealing with here.
We also get the somewhat strange but commonly P concept that the thing that purifies also impurifies. This mixture makes an impure person pure, but the pure person who makes it - the priest, even - is impure (though mildly). Same for the person who gathers up the ashes.
The millennialist obsession is around the pure redness of the cow, which is of course phenomenally rare, and also isn’t in the Bible at all. It just says a red heifer without blemish - not a perfectly red cow. But by all means, go ahead and prepare for the eschaton, y’all.
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