The Red Heifer: A Prophetic Redux: A Prophetic Think Tank
The Red Heifer is a Type of Messiah and the Prophetic Word
Note: this is not a stand-alone article. It was pulled from a wider discussion of typology.
The animal is convertible by God from something bad to something good symbolically as well as divination. This conversion shows that God beats paganism and ignorance on its own terms, on the purely non-transcendent, cultural level.
Any use of an animal in the biblical symbolic system is called a biblical type. A type is a prophetic symbol. To get to the heart of what they are prophetic of and how one is used in contrast to another, I will take you back to Leviticus chapter 19 and the Red Heifer. The ritual described is for purification in the event of one touching a dead body.
The animal was to be completely consumed by the fire and its ashes kept for this purification, from which only a small portion would be used. When the ashes ran out and defilement took place, another sacrifice would commence and more ashes would be stored up.
A female was to be used (Lev 5:1-6), unspotted, red, never been yoked (Due 21:3), cedar, hyssop and scarlet to be thrown into the fire, and the sacrifice was to completely consumed. The is the only sacrifice in which ashes were used in the purification.
Of course, we know the Red Heifer is a symbol, a biblical type, of the Messiah. There are limitless explanations of what this signifies for the Messiah. Many of these will never be known, as they were given to the Jews in a certain cultural milieu that is long past. It is our presupposition, however, that understanding exactly what God intended to teach by each of these commandments in the ritual is of much less importance than the knowledge that God is not instituting these complex rituals simply because he personally likes them and he wants Israel to do them; that they are meant to transmit divine knowledge to the people that they would otherwise never have.
However, we also don’t assume that he only intended the sacrifice symbolism to only OT Israel, only the sacrifice itself. In other words, God intends that the object of the symbol may pass away if the inner law of the symbol is revealed and fulfilled, which that object was originally instituted to do, living on as an inheritance of future generations. A particular signification of the symbol may also pass away, but its ultimate spiritual signification remains to continue teaching the world.
Our assumption then, and all OT symbols, is that the precise ancient, culturally nuanced meanings may pass out of existence, but not their ability to give us contemporaneous insight about the Messiah, which is the ultimate typological goal. Although God wants to teach a certain spiritual truth for the salvation of the Nation of Israel by knowledge of the Messiah, it is also for all time after its religious function becomes obsolete another, deeper lesson for the world.
Certain literal correspondences are between the Red Heifer and the Messiah is unmistakable. No yoke: dedicated to spiritual matters, not yoked to a carnal existence and work, spotless: without sin and completely consumed.
The more obscure significations remain there, such as the command for running water to be used for the washing of the priests garments, but are easily used today to teach about the truth of the Messiah against the growing skepticism of the modern age toward the idea of a conclusive transcendent revelation about a person of history controlling our epistemic conclusions about religious faith.
For example, we might teach that only running, non-stagnant water was used to wash the priest’s garments because only pure spiritual truth is capable of removing and accompanying our creative means of hiding our sin, or our spoken reasons for its existence. Commentators almost universally apply water to the Holy Spirit, but only as an object of power and not His function of knowledge, here easily denoting the scriptural truth of the Messiah; the publication and inspiration of such truth in believers His ultimate reason for operating in the world.
The idea of the atonement, ultimate sacrifice in the ritual of the Red Heifer, is always given as only a symbol of the one sacrifice for sin that Christ made on the cross, but none seem to point out how the symbol might also indicate a specific kind of knowledge that people rejected or accepted in faith that made that sacrifice necessary: Messiah’s mission was one consuming sacrifice for the purification of people who had been spiritually defiled not primarily by a bodily action, but by a certain belief, a belief in an exclusive carnal take on spiritual truth that was to grow in Israel as they rejected the Messianic vision controlling their religion.[1]
Does this seem forced? Not if Messiah is synonymous with God’s prophetic promise and historical fulfillment of him. As we will see, I believe that this kind of teaching is the most natural thing in the world when we finally face up to the full implications of the meaning of the transcendent token, which we will see.
Continuing with the Red Heifer, I also mention that the Ancient Rabbi’s like Rashi believed that the Red Heifer was a rectification for the sin of the Golden calf (commentary on Bamidbar 19:2, quotes Moshe Hadarshan. See Bamidbar Book 4, Numbers), that God sent the Red Heifer down as to clean up the mess of a child. Moses commanded golden calf be crushed completely and the gold combined with water, a mixture that the sinners were told to drink. The command that the heifer be naturally spotless has an antitype in the Golden Calf’s artificial gold covering.
When the red heifer is placed against the Golden Calf and they are viewed and considered as a whole statement, we don’t have the kind of symbol which we usually think of as a symbol, but if one is a response to another, we certainly should be thought obliged to take it as such. A conventional material/immaterial symbol is an image of the Red heifer, for example, which can be taken as a conventional symbol, which is either material or immaterial, having an objective aspect and an abstract aspect that converse with and illuminate each other, but not necessarily anything outside the material and immaterial box. The red heifer as a conventional, opaque symbol, not a transcendent symbol, is a kind of symbol that only gives a word and a definition for that word.
For example, the Red Heifer means Messiah, or the Red Heifer’s complete destruction means resurrection of Messiah, or, to venture outside the immediate word/definition symbol and search for something else, perhaps we will notice that the Golden calf is its cause, or that the bitter water from the Calf corresponds to the pure water in the ashes mixture.
The problem with this is that nothing here that cries demanding the teaching about the ultimate informational signification of the Messiah, and his ultimate place in our theology as a whole, as it does an informational signification of the Red Heifer and, in contrast, the Golden calf.
I would expect that if God instituted these things for an ultimate reason and for the distant ages, and Messiah is the central figure of history and theology, then our failure of being able to think of these symbols as anything more than a pointer to him or his antithesis represents mostly a symbol of our ultimate sin of keeping Messiah in a box, and his symbols kept only at the level of conventionality. The transcendent symbol can be a material object and a signification by something else, but the meaning of them both is piece of knowledge about the object of faith and the informational law of our faith which has come from outside the world for the purpose of changing the world.
If we put the Golden Calf and the Red Heifer together, we are not, or should not be speaking, only of a cause and an effect. We are speaking of a divine sentence of a divine language about the Messiah and truth. This is also the brazen serpent symbolism, and this pattern runs through the OT.
The whole mosaic system was instituted as a system of the redemption from sin primarily by animal sacrifice, in which the sacrificial animal and all its accompanying imagery are about the Messiah, in response to the hard-heartedness of belief of the Children of Israel.
In Exodus 20, immediately after the giving of the Decalogue, God showed himself in the sound a trumpet, smoke, thunder, and lightning. The people became frightened and told Moses, “speak thou with us, and we will hear: but let not God speak with us, lest we die.” Mosses told them not to be afraid, that “his fear may be before your faces,” that God was testing them so that they would not sin. I take this symbolically to mean that the people did not want to see God manifested before them, at least in His most fearful and disturbing form. I can then assume that he could be accepted present in the form of a human being or represented symbolically. Moses then became the people’s only intercessor, and the law was instituted here (verses 23-26) before it was enumerated in detail in later books. What would now stand between the people and God was Moses and the symbol. It is then natural that we should expect the pattern of sin/corrective symbol to repeat itself over and over.
Therefore the Red Heifer is a good symbol of redemption and the Golden calf is a bad symbol of false redemption. But we don’t leave it there as a general kind of redemption, but redemption by Messianic prophecy on the one hand and pagan style divination on the other.
Especially with the sin of divination/prophetic symbol, I point out that many writers see the Golden Calf as a return to pagan Egyptian Apis bull worship. Aaron claimed that the calf miraculously sprang from the fire when the donated gold was thrown into it (Ex 32:24). Therefore, if the Red Heifer is a response to the pagan Golden calf, then it is surely a response of good divination of Messiah to that of false divination by false gods.
This contest is plain to see in Moses’ miraculous signs against the Egyptian gods in Egypt which resulted in the people’s freedom, and it is a pattern of active obedience or denial of God’s true divination, especially of the Messiah, that repeats through Israel’s history. If the Red Heifer is prophetic of Messiah, and others like it, and the prophetic is God’s true divination (Messianic prophecy), then anything genuinely antithetical should be expected to typify false divination, and this is the basis of sin which the Law was instituted to work against: belief and trust in false redeemers who divine and give false truth claims and promise a false future.
Leviticus continues in chapter 20, which is one of those many reiterations of the law that Moses takes after some great event or important new law instituted. With the Red Heifer, we have Divine divination, a portent to the future, and here we have the contrast through warning against the sin of bad divination, or the false divination of Molech. The warning is to abstain from human sacrifice, sexual sin and the patronizing of “wizards” (v. 6, ynedy), repeated in v. 27 to end the chapter. Hnz, zaw-naw, whoredom, is used for sexual sin and figuratively for spiritual sin. In v. 5 and v.6 it is used to refer to religious harlotry with Molech.
[1] The Book of Enoch. In chapter 84, section 17 Enoch recounts a dream to Methuselah: “I saw a vision in my bed; and behold, a cow sprung forth from the earth, and this cow was white. Afterward a female heifer sprung forth; and with it another heifer: one of them was black, and one was red. The black heifer then struck the red one and pursued it over the earth. From that period, I could see nothing more of the red heifer.” This is an example not simply of a prophecy of the passing away of the sacrifice and the Messiah, but the reasons why: the messianic prophetic vision historically ceasing in Israel as the basis of their religion but living on to roam freely over the entire earth.
An Analysis of the Brazen Serpent Imagery: Passing by Nehushtan
The Meaning of the Cross and the Lord’s Prayer, part 2: Passing by Nehushtan
