Red Heifer

Nicole Ruane offered an intriguing discussion of the red heifer purification law (Num 19) as an “anti-sacrifice” or “inverted sacrifice.” At a number of points, the actions and concerns of Num 19 overlap with those of the sacrificial texts. The heifer is called a HATTAT (purification offering), and the animal is killed, burned, and its remnants distributed as in a normal sacrifice. (This is in contract to the non-sacrificial procedures for the animal in Deut 21.)

Yet, the rite for the red heifer diverges at significant points from the sacrificial rite. The heifer is not killed at the altar, and its blood is not removed – the text explicitly and uniquely speaks about the burning of the animals blood. The animal is not brought into the holy place, but taken outside the camp, and the portion that is brought into the camp is the portion that is normally excluded – the waste ashes.

Most of the sacrifices involve a dismemberment. Not only is the animal broken into “its pieces,” but the various components of the living animal are separated – blood, organs, skin, fat, meat, dung. The red heifer, however, is kept intact – the blood is not wholly drained, and the entire animal is burned up together. She suggested that the heifer is treated more like a carcass than a sacrifice.

Most strikingly, the red heifer’s place in the scales of holy/profane and clean/unclean seems all mixed up. The rite is performed for someone who is unclean, while most sacrifices assume that the sacrificer is clean. (This seems to assume that the red heifer was offered each time someone needed to be cleansed from corpse defilement, rather than simply to collect the ash-concoction that was used repeatedly.) Further, even though the heifer’s ashes bring cleansing, everyone who has contact with the animal or its ashes is unclean. The water is in fact called the water if “impurity,” and the text uses NIDAH, normally used for the menstruant woman, so that this rite embodies in an interesting way a combination of reproductive and death-impurity. Rouen suggested that the heifer might not in fact cleanse the person who undergoes the rite – rather, the water of impurity may actually intensify the impurity of the person, pushing him past the degree of impurity he has from corpse defilement into a kind of absolute impurity that is somehow necessary in order to overcome the virulent impurity of the corpse. She noted in passing that ashes were used in mourning rites in ancient Israel, a suggestion that seems worth following up.

Her main goal was to determine why the heifer needed to be a heifer – female – and why it needed to be red. Red is perhaps to be associated with blood, and blood in the sacrificial system is both defiling (menstruant and childbirth) and life-giving/cleansing. Rouen argued that a female animal is uniquely positioned to symbolize both sides of the symbolism of blood, since only female blood defiles among humans. James Jordan questioned this – what if a man had a bloody emission from his “flesh”? Would he be unclean? It would seem so. In any case, Rouen was suggesting that the heifer, being female, could embody both the defiling and the cleansing power of blood; only a heifer could indicate the NIDAH while also carrying the connotations of blood-purgation.