Imamat 22:4-6

22:4 No man ¹  from the descendants of Aaron who is diseased or has a discharge ²  may eat the holy offerings until he becomes clean. The one ³  who touches anything made unclean by contact with a dead person, ⁴  or a man who has a seminal emission, ⁵  22:5 or a man who touches a swarming thing by which he becomes unclean, ⁶  or touches a person ⁷  by which he becomes unclean, whatever that person’s impurity ⁸  – 22:6 the person who touches any of these ⁹  will be unclean until evening and must not eat from the holy offerings unless he has bathed his body in water.

Bilangan 19:13

19:13 Anyone who touches the corpse of any dead person and does not purify himself defiles the tabernacle of the Lord. And that person must be cut off from Israel, ¹⁰  because the water of purification was not sprinkled on him. He will be unclean; his uncleanness remains on him.

[22:4]  ¹ tn Heb “Man man.” The reduplication is a way of saying “any man” (cf. Lev 15:2; 17:3, etc.), but with a negative command it means “No man” (see B. A. Levine, Leviticus [JPSTC], 147).

[22:4]  ² sn The diseases and discharges mentioned here are those described in Lev 13-15.

[22:4]  ³ tn Heb “And the one.”

[22:4]  ⁴ tn Heb “in all unclean of a person/soul”; for the Hebrew term נֶפֶשׁ (nefesh) meaning “a [dead] person,” see the note on Lev 19:28.

[22:4]  ⁵ tn Heb “or a man who goes out from him a lying of seed.”

[22:5]  ⁶ tn Heb “which there shall be uncleanness to him.”

[22:5]  ⁷ tn The Hebrew term for “person” here is אָדָם (adam, “human being”), which could either a male or a female person.

[22:5]  ⁸ tn Heb “to all his impurity.” The phrase refers to the impurity of the person whom the man touches to become unclean (see the previous clause). To clarify this, the translation uses “that person’s” rather than “his.”

[22:6]  ⁹ sn The phrase “any of these” refers back to the unclean things touched in vv. 4b-5.

[19:13]  ¹⁰ sn It is in passages like this that the view that being “cut off” meant the death penalty is the hardest to support. Would the Law prescribe death for someone who touches a corpse and fails to follow the ritual? Besides, the statement in this section that his uncleanness remains with him suggests that he still lives on.