The clean person shall sprinkle on the unclean on the third day, and on the seventh day. On the seventh day, he shall purify him. He shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water, and shall be clean at evening.
Those defiled by a corpse must be purified with the ashes of the red heifer
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְהִזָּה הַטָּהֹר עַל־הַטָּמֵא בַּיּוֹם הַשְּׁלִישִׁי וּבַיּוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי וְחִטְּאוֹ בַּיּוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי
Literary form: a ritual instruction
Applicability
How the catalog describes where and when this commandment applies. These are independent descriptions, not a verdict on which laws still count.
- Requires a standing Temple
Classical halakhic consequences
The consequences the classical halakhah attaches to this commandment, grouped by who imposes them. Where a category has none recorded, that absence is itself meaningful.
Imposed by a court
No court-imposed penalty is recorded.
At the hands of Heaven
No divinely-imposed consequence is recorded.
Ritual remedy
No ritual remedy is recorded.
How the streams of Judaism treat this commandment
The streams of Judaism read the same commandment differently — an ongoing plurality, not a ranking. Each position below is reported as the catalog records it; none is presented as the correct one.
- Orthodox Binding, with modification
- Conservative Not binding
- Reform Not binding
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- Karaite Binding, with modification
24 of 613 commandments have been examined in depth so far — this one is queued.
How later traditions received this commandment
How later traditions read or reworked this commandment, each attributed to its own voice. The catalog’s own classification of each reception is shown as it records it, never adopted as GEBible’s.
Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls)
- 4Q277 (4QToharot Bb) read it more strictly
- 4Q274 (4QTohorot A) with CD purity halakhah read it more strictly
Rabbinic aggadah
- Numbers Rabbah 19:1-8 expanded it homiletically
- Pesikta de-Rav Kahana 4 (Parah) expanded it homiletically
- Tanhuma Chukkat 8 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 1.262-272 read it allegorically
Josephus
- Ant. 4.79-81 rationalized it
The New Testament
- Hebrews 9:13-14 read it spiritually Ashes of a heifer treated as a type of incomplete purification superseded by Christ's blood
The Church Fathers
- Epistle of Barnabas, Barnabas 8.1-7 read it allegorically
- Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 13 read it spiritually
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 2:67-71 (al-Baqarah, the cow / al-baqarah) The catalog describes this reception as: loose parallel
Beside the older legal codes of its world
The commandment set beside the ancient Near-Eastern legal collections scholars compare it to — a descriptive comparison, not a claim of dependence.
- hittite ritual texts ritual purification/contagion of impurity from contact with the dead Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence Hittite royal funerary ritual (CTH 450) and related death-purification material Kassian, Korolëv, and Sidel'tsev, Hittite Funerary Ritual (sallis wastais), AOAT 288 (2002)
Where this commandment meets modern human-rights frameworks
One modern normative lens, attributed to it — not GEBible’s assessment. Each row names the framework it measures against and the catalog’s own classification of the relation.
This framework catalogues tensions; it records agreement in only one of its entries. The near-total tension rate is the shape of the instrument, not a finding.
No tension with the catalogued modern frameworks is recorded here.