The Red Heifer

"This is the ordinance of the law… bring thee a red heifer without spot, wherein is no blemish, and upon which never came yoke." Eleazar the priest takes it outside the camp; it is slaughtered, and he sprinkles its blood toward the tabernacle seven times. The whole animal is burned, with cedar wood, hyssop and scarlet thrown into the fire.

A clean man gathers the ashes and keeps them outside the camp, "for a water of separation." Whoever touches a corpse, a bone or a grave is unclean seven days; on the third and seventh days he is sprinkled with water mixed with the ashes, and on the seventh he washes and is clean.

Strangely, everyone who prepares the ashes becomes unclean until evening, while the ashes make the unclean clean.

The law without a reason

Jewish tradition called this a chok, a statute without a stated reason, and it became the classic example. A midrash says that even King Solomon, who understood everything, could not understand it. The paradox that the ashes purify the impure but defile the pure fascinated interpreters.

How many red heifers?

The Mishnah (Parah 3:5) says the ashes were renewed rarely: one heifer in Moses' time, one by Ezra, and five, or seven, in the rest of the Second Temple period. Maimonides added that the tenth would be made by the Messiah. Without a Temple, no ashes have been made since AD 70.

In 2022 a group in Israel brought red heifers from a ranch in Texas, hoping one would qualify for a renewed ritual on the Mount of Olives. The effort has drawn wide attention, and controversy, because of what it could mean for the Temple Mount.