Numbers 19:8

Summary

Numbers 19:8 specifies that the man who burns the red heifer must wash his clothes and bathe his body in water, after which he remains ritually unclean until evening. The verse forms a legal sequence describing the purification obligations placed on this specific participant in the ritual.

Key words

• so.Ref ("[one who] burns", H8313) — qal participle used substantively; it identifies the subject not by name but by the action he performs ("the one doing the burning"), a common Hebrew way to designate a ritual functionary.
• yekhabbes ("he will wash", H3526H) — piel imperfect; the intensive stem is regularly used in this legal corpus for washing garments, distinct from the verb used for the body in the same verse.
• rachatz ("he will wash", H7364) — qal sequential perfect (vav-consecutive), continuing the action chain begun by the imperfect verb; this qal form is applied specifically to washing the body (besaro, "his body/flesh", H1320), not the clothes.
• tame' ("he will be unclean", H2930A) — qal sequential perfect; a stative verb expressing the resulting condition, closing the sequence of actions with a declared status rather than another action.
• 'ad ha'arev ("until the evening", H5704 + H6153) — prepositional phrase marking the temporal boundary of the unclean state.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a chain of three verbs linked by vav: an initial piel imperfect (yekhabbes, "he will wash") followed by two qal sequential perfects (rachatz, "he will wash/bathe"; tame', "he will be unclean"). This verbal chain encodes a temporal-logical sequence typical of legal/ritual Hebrew prose: first the clothes are washed, then the body is bathed, and only then does the resulting unclean status take effect until evening. Notably, the text uses two different verbs for washing — kabes (piel, H3526H) for garments and rachatz (qal, H7364) for the body — reflecting a grammatical and lexical distinction between treating cloth and treating flesh, even though both are rendered "wash" in the English glosses provided. The subject throughout is identified only through the participle so.Ref, "the one burning," anchoring the verse to the ritual actor introduced in the surrounding context rather than naming him directly.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders both washing actions with a single verb, "lavabit vestimenta sua et corpus" ("he will wash his clothes and body"), collapsing the two distinct Hebrew verbs (kabes/rachatz) into one Latin verb applied to both objects. The LXX, by contrast, preserves a two-verb structure — πλυνεῖ ("he will wash") for τὰ ἱμάτια ("the garments") and λούσεται ("he will bathe") for τὸ σῶμα ("the body") — paralleling the Hebrew's lexical distinction between cloth-washing and body-washing more closely than the Vulgate does.