Numbers 19:11-22

The Voice

¹¹ Anyone who touches a dead human body will be considered impure for a week. ¹² Midweek and at the end, on the third and seventh days, he will use the burnt offering ashes dissolved in water to purify himself. If he fails to do so, he will not be pure. ¹³ This is a serious business, for everyone who comes into contact with a human corpse must purify himself like this. Otherwise, he pollutes My tent and so must be banished from Israel. If he has not been doused with the special cleansing water, his impurity still clings to him. He is impure.

¹⁴ Now if someone dies indoors, then everyone entering or inside the tent will be impure for the full seven days. ¹⁵ Not only that, but any cup, jar, or bowl that is open or didn’t otherwise have a cover attached when that person died will also be impure. ¹⁶ Out in the countryside, the same general rule applies. If someone happens to touch a person either killed outright or who simply died naturally, or if he touches a single human bone or a whole gravesite, he shall be impure for the week. ¹⁷ For such a person, take some of the aforesaid ashes mixed in a container with running water. ¹⁸ A person who is ritually pure should then dip a hyssop branch into the water and splash some water on the contaminated home—and on all the things in it and the people, too—or on the person who touched a corpse or some part of a dead person. ¹⁹ The ritually pure person must do this for the impure individual on the third and seventh days. Then he must purify himself, washing his body and clothes in water, so that he’s pure when it becomes evening on the seventh day.

²⁰ Those who don’t so purify themselves shall be cast out of the community because they have scorned and polluted My holy place. Since the cleansing water hasn’t been splashed on them, they are impure. ²¹ This is a perpetual decree. The person who sprinkles the water and the one who touches the water for impurity also needs to wash his clothes after handling the cleansing water and will be ritually impure until evening. ²² Everything any impure person touches will be impure and make others who touch it impure, too, until evening.