less survival, of which innumerable parallels will occur to students of comparative religion, from the time when the fragrant woods, such as junijier and cyi)re.'<s ami the aromatic plants of the mint family, were supposed to act as a protection against the harmful unseen powers that were the cause of death * and hovered about the dead. The scarlet cloth is to be explained either by the fact that a special healing virtue was assigned in antiquity to the scarlet dye (11elitzsch,t art. ' Sprengwasser ' in Kiehm's //lI'/J d. bihl. Altcrthums-), or by the universally prevalent idea of red, the colour of the sacred blood, as the taboo colour par excellence (Jevons, Introd. to Hist, of Religion, 67 ff. ; Trum- bull, The Blood Covenant, 23(5f.).t The line of thought along which we have sought to explain this confessedly difficult part of the ritual, to the exclusion of the adv.anced symbolical interpreta- tion hitherto current, finds further justification in the use of a sprinkler, consisting of a bunch of hyssop, tied to a handle of juniper wood by a similar strip of scarlet cloth, in sprinkling a house, as well as a person, that was to be declared free from the plague of leprosy (Lv 14°"'^').
While we have thus endeavoured to trace the origin of the ritual of the red heifer to its source in an atmosphere of primitive religious thought common to the Hebrews of the pre-Mosaic age with other r.aces on a similar plane of develop- ment, it must not be forgotten that the rite received a higher and fuller interpretation in being admitted Into the circle of the priestly legislation of the post-exilic age. Uncleanness and sin, sin and death, are now associated ideiis (for the whole subject, see art. Uncleanness). The red heifer has become a sin-od'ering ( vv.'- ") of a unique kind ; part of the blood is sprinkled towards the dwelling- place of J", from whose worship those 'unclean from the de.id ' are temporarily excluded, the rest is burned with the victim to heighten the expiatory efficacy of the ashes. The rite in all its details becomes a powerful object-lesson, teachin" the eternal truth that a holy God can be servea only by a holy people.
It is no longer possible to ascertain the extent to which the ' water of impurity ' was actually used as a medium of lustration by the mass of tiie Jewish people. Even such sober investi- gators as llelitzuch and L^illmann have pointed out the ditti- cullies in the way of an extended application of the ritual of Nu 10 in a thickly peopled country. Again, what are we to make of the statement {i'arah iii. 5) that only seven or nine red heifers were slain in all— the first by Moses, the second by Ezra, and the rest later? The jirobability is that, like many other of the more stringent rec|uiremenC« of the LeviLical code, the observance was confined to the more ardent le;,'alist8 in Jerusalem. Jewish tradition represents this and other rites regarding uncleanness as ceasing to be observed about fifty yeara after the destruction of the temple (Hamburger, Heal- eucycl. d. JudetUhuiiw, i. 874). The red heifer, it may be remarked finally, has given her name to the second cliapter of the Koran, ' the snrah of tlie heifer,* in which, however, Mohannned in his usual fashion has confused the two heifera of Nu 10 and Lit il (see »ur. ii. to ff.).
iv. The red heifer as a t>ipe of Chriit. — It was natural that the early Church should si^c in the expiatory rite of Nu 19 a prefiguring of the atoning work of our Lord. The first to give literary ex- pression to this idea, which has received such detailed elaboration at the hands of successive generations of typologists, is the author of the
• In comparatively recent times In our own country, a Juniper tree planted before a house was regarded as a preventive of the plague.
I l)clit7.sch is apparently the only writer who has sought to assign other than a purely symbolical significance to these three element*. See, bc.sides ihc above article, his commcDtary OD Ho lil^, and cf. Nowack, Arch. ii. '280, note 1.
! If we could l>e sure that the red colour ot the heifer was M old ojt the practice of burning for the sake of the ashes, the choice would probably have t^ l>e exniainefl by the same associa- tion of ideas. The oxen sacrificed by the ancient Egyptians ha<I also to be red, a single black or white hair disqualifyuig ao animal for the sacrifice Q'lutnrch, Iti* tt Oirirw, SI ; Herod. U. 3S, cited hv Frazcr, Ouldm Boti'ih, i. 300, 2nil ed., 1000, il. 812).
210
RED HORSE
REDEEMEK, REDEMPTION
Epistle to tlie Hebrews in the familiar passage 9'"-. In the Kpistle of Barnabas we find a whole chapter (ch. 8) devoted to this subject, in the course of which the writer shows an intimate acquaintance with contemporary Jewish practice as reflected in the Mishna (see esp. Parah iii. 2, 3). ' The calf is Jesus,' the juniper wood is His cross, while the scarlet wool, the hyssop, and other details receive a more or less appropriate iuterpretation.
LiTERATURB. — The comm, on Nu 19, esp. Dillmann ; the treatise Parah (Lat. tr. with commentaries in Surenhu'jius' Mishna, vol. vi., English in Barclay's Talmud, p. SOOff.), which fcnns the basis of Maimonides' treatise ms noVn, edited with Lat. tr. and notes by A. C. Zeller, de Vaoca Rufa, 17H ; Spencer, de legg. Heb. ril. ii. 15, ' de vitula rufa,' etc. ; Bahr, SvmboUk des ilosaUchen Cultus, 1839, i. 493-612 ; Kurtz in SK, 1846, p, 629 9. ; Edersheim, The Temple, etc. p. 304 £f. ; works on Biblical archaeology-, esp. Haneberg, Keil (i. 385 ff.), and Nowack (ii. 2S3 ff.) ; art. * Sprengwasser * by Delitzsch in Riehm's HWB d, bibl. AUerthuilui-, and * Reinigungen ' by KbmginPJ;i.=. A. R. S. KENNEDY.