The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls: The ... - josephprestonkirk

JOSEPH M. BAUMGARTEN 97
principles that were involved. However, this work should not be without
interest for students of early Christianity. Allow me two brief illustrations.
1. The Epistle of Barnabas, a Christian theological tract thought to stem
from about the end of the first century C.E., contains the following interpretation
of the red cow ritual:
But what do you think it typifies, that the commandment has been given
to Israel that the men in whom sin is complete offer a heifer and slay it
and burn it, and that boys then take the ashes and put them into vessels
and bind scarlet wool on sticks (see again the type of the Cross and the
scarlet wool) and hyssop, and that the boys all sprinkle the people thus
one by one in order that they all be purified from their sins? 3
A comparison of the details of this description with the halakah found in
the Mishnah and Tosefta was already initiated by an historian of the rabbinic
age, Gedalia Alon. 4 The following is the perhaps somewhat embellished
description of the procedure preserved in m. Parah 3:2:
There were courtyards in Jerusalem built upon rock, with hollow space
under them (thus avoiding the concern) for underground graves. They
would bring pregnant women and they would give birth there and rear
their sons there. They would bring oxen with doors upon their backs, and
the children would sit upon them, with cups of stone in their hands. When
they arrived at the Siloam, they descended and filled them.
After they mixed ashes kept from previous red cow rites with the water,
the children would sprinkle it upon the priest who was to perform the
current rite (m. Parah 3:1). The ostensible aim of these precautions and
the use of children reared in purity was to eliminate the possibility that
those preparing the water and the ashes might themselves be carriers of
corpse impurity.
Interestingly, we now have Qumran texts which specifically reject this
Pharisaic stratagem of using young boys to do the sprinkling. They insist
that only a priest of mature age was qualified to accomplish the purgation
by means of the sprinkling waters. Here we have another Qumran-
Pharisaic dispute over purity, which at the same time serves to confirm
the historicity of the account found in the Mishnah.
Our second illustration concerns the use of sprinkling water for general
purification from any sort of ritual uncleanness. The classical biblical
locus for the use of sprinkling water for lustration is Numbers 19, where
3. Barn. 8:1, The Apostolic Fathers I (trans. K. Lake; Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1959), 369.
4. Gedalia Alon, Mehkarim be-toldot Yisra)el (Tel-Aviv: HaKibbuttz HaMeuchad,
1957), 1:296–302. (Hebrew)