2. a perfect red cow that has no blemish. The traditional rendering of parah as “heifer” is not warranted by the Hebrew, which in no way suggests that the beast is not mature. The red color appears to be associated with the importance of blood in the purification ritual that follows, an association reinforced by the phonetic overlap in Hebrew between dam, “blood,” and ʾadom, “red.”

on which no yoke has been put. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “on which no yoke has gone up.” The manifest idea is that the cow should not have been used for profane purposes.

3. she shall be slaughtered. The Hebrew uses an impersonal third-person masculine verb, “one shall slaughter her,” a fairly common equivalent of the passive. (The same form occurs at the beginning of verse 5.) As verse 8 makes clear, some person other than Eleazar the priest does the burning: the priest himself is kept at a certain distance from this procedure, supervising it (the force of “before him” in this verse).

4. her blood. As elsewhere, blood has a purifying function, serving as what Jacob Milgrom calls a “spiritual detergent.” The blood is sprinkled “toward” the Tent of Meeting because the whole ritual takes place at a considerable distance from it, outside the camp.

9. it is an offense offering. This comment is a kind of gloss. A normal offense offering would be sacrificed on the altar to expiate an offense. These ashes mixed with water serve a similar function of ridding the person of contamination. Both the corpse and the act of transgression are imagined as imparting a polluting physical residue, a kind of miasma, that has to be cleansed.

11. He who touches a dead body. Baruch Levine has made a persuasive case that the “hidden agenda” of this whole section is an attempt to discourage the cult of the dead. Sundry Ugaritic and Mesopotamian documents suggest a widespread cult of the dead (especially, royal dead) in the ancient Near East, and there are some hints of its presence in the Bible proper. These laws, then, argue that the dead, far from being objects of worship and propitiation, are a source of contamination, and that even accidental contact with corpse or grave or bone requires a rite of purification. Without such purification, the defiled person is proscribed from the community (verse 13).

12. the ashes. The Hebrew says only “it,” but the antecedent of the pronoun has been substituted for clarity in the translation. (The Hebrew for “ashes” is singular.)

14. all that is in the tent will be unclean. The ritual impurity exuded by the corpse contaminates everything within the enclosed space of the tent, except for tightly sealed vessels. Although there is a similarity here to the modern understanding of the mechanism of contagion in highly communicable diseases, the similarity is a coincidence flowing from the ancient conception of impurity as a seeping miasma.

16. a corpse slain by sword or a dead body or a human bone. Any dead body, whether a victim of the sword or of natural causes, or any remnant of a dead body, is equally contaminant. The stress on “human,” as some of the medieval commentators note, indicates that no distinction is intended between Israelite and non-Israelite corpses.

17. the dust. Dust and ashes, because they are a set collocation in biblical usage (see Genesis 18:27), exhibit a certain degree of interchangeability, though ʿafar does usually indicate dust of the earth and ʾefer the residue of burning.