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Numbers 6:9
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Numbers 6:9 Meaning and Commentary
And if any man die very suddenly by him
In the place where he is, whether house or field, a public or private place, in the tent where he is, as Jarchi; there are two words we render, "very suddenly", which many take to be synonymous; and that being of the same signification, two being used increase the sense, but others think they have a different meaning: the Targums of Onkelos and Jonathan render them,
``suddenly through ignorance,''understanding it of a chance matter, as when one man is killed by another, not wilfully and through malice, but without intention and design: Jarchi interprets the first of them by violence, and the latter through error or mistake, and so may include both cases; as when a man dies at once, through the force of a disease seizing him, or he is killed by the violent hands of a man, who stabs him in the presence of a Nazarite; or else when this is done ignorantly and through mistake; be it which way it will, if a Nazarite was present:
and he both defiled the head of his consecration:
or the consecration of his head, his Nazariteship, that is, his hair, he being polluted by the dead, through being where it was:
then he shall shave his head in the day of his cleansing;
which was the seventh day from his defilement, as follows:
on the seventh day he shall shave it;
for so many days was a person unclean that had touched a body, of had been where one was, and on the seventh day he was to be cleansed, ( Numbers 19:11 Numbers 19:12 ) ; and this was one way of cleansing the Nazarite, cutting off his locks of hair, which were to grow long, and made him to be a Nazarite; and shave his head for his pollution by the dead, put an end to his Nazariteship; and he was obliged to begin again, and his hair being polluted, must be shaved, and new hair grow to make him a Nazarite again: thus by one single breach of the law of God a man becomes guilty of all, and liable to its curse, and his legal righteousness becomes insufficient to justify him before God, and therefore his own righteousness must be renounced by him in the business of justification; and which, Ainsworth suggests, is the mystery of the Nazarite's head being shaved when polluted.