I don’t know about you, but if I’m an Israelite in Old Testament times, I’m wanting to stay ritually pure for as long as I can.
The opposite isn’t appealing to me at all: social isolation, prohibitions from worship, elongated cleansing rituals. I get that many of those things that would cause you to be impure are somewhat unavoidable (childbirth, leprosy, discharges), but I still would like to stay with my people as much as possible.
It’s a relief to know that most of the time, impurities were cleansed by evening. By that point, you could resume your normal activities.
Unless you touched a dead body, that is. According to Numbers 19, interaction with a corpse made you unclean for seven full days.
This is noteworthy, considering that the other issues that made you unclean for that amount of time (or longer) were personal. Having a child, for instance, rendered you unclean a week or more (Leviticus 12:1-8). Eczema made you unclean for as long as it was active (Leviticus 13).
Touching a corpse was impersonal, and could’ve been encountered through any one of a thousand ways. You could stumble over one in the field, encounter one in battle, or handle a relative that had passed away.
In those situations, it wasn’t something necessarily impure about yourself as much as it was interacting with something that was impure.
Most ritual defilements are discussed in modern circles as a preventing the spread of disease—something ancient peoples knew very little about. Certain types of leprosy could be contagious, for instance, so ritual defilements not only protected the holiness of the group, but also limited the spread of disease.
Touching a dead person could be seen in the same way, although you would have to be very involved in handling a corpse for any major issues to creep up. There is a concern with air-borne pathogens, though; that could be the reason open containers are classified as unclean in Numbers 19:15.
The most startling part of this section has to do with the multi-stage cleansing ritual. Not only do you have to purify yourself on the seventh day (using the water that is mixed with the ashes of a red heifer), but you also have to do it on the third day. Both are required in order to purify yourself.
To my knowledge, this is the only purity ritual in the Old Testament that requires two stages of purification. And if you miss either one of them, you not only remain unclean, but risk “defiling the Tabernacle.”
This whole progression shows the seriousness of death. Since God is the giver of life, death can be seen as the undoing of His work, even if it’s for natural causes.
That applies double for the Tabernacle. The sacrifices that occurred inside the sanctuary were meant to maintain spiritual life. Death is the opposite, and as such, should be cleansed properly.