Later text
Numbers 19:6BSB
The priest is to take cedar wood, hyssop, and scarlet wool and throw them onto the burning heifer.
Intertextuality Pair
Allusion
Later text
Numbers 19:6BSB
The priest is to take cedar wood, hyssop, and scarlet wool and throw them onto the burning heifer.
Earlier text
the priest shall order that two live clean birds, cedar wood, scarlet yarn, and hyssop be brought for the one to be cleansed. Then the priest shall command that one of the birds be slaughtered over fresh water in a clay pot. And he is to take the live bird together with the cedar wood, scarlet yarn, and hyssop, and dip them into the blood of the bird that was slaughtered over the fresh water.
Both Leviticus 14:4-6 and Numbers 19:6 prescribe the same triad of purification materials: cedar wood (עֵץ אֶרֶז, etz erez), hyssop (אֵזוֹב, ezov), and scarlet yarn/wool (שְׁנִי תוֹלַעַת, sheni tola'at). In Leviticus 14, these are dipped in the blood of a slaughtered bird over running water to purify the leper; in Numbers 19, they are thrown into the burning red heifer to produce the ashes for purification from corpse-contamination. The shared purification bundle links two distinct defilement categories — disease and death — under a common ritual logic, suggesting that the same cleansing principle operates across different domains of impurity. The cedar (durability), hyssop (humble plant used for sprinkling), and scarlet (blood-colored wool) appear to constitute a fixed purification formula in Israel's ritual system.