Ancient and Medieval Jewish Readings of the Heifer

The paradox of a purifying ritual that renders its preparers impure is seldom addressed by ancient and medieval Jewish interpreters, and several interpretive moves are made to avoid it. Both the Hebrew Bible and later rabbinic commentators classified the commandment as a statute (ḥok), a law that seems to be purposeless and subject to ridicule, and this was a satisfactory justification for Jewish exegetes not to tackle the intractable paradox.Footnote ⁶ A midrashic account (ca. first century, Judea) cites an anecdote in which a gentile challenged Rabbi Yoḥanan ben Zakkai to explain the red heifer commandment. The Rabbi analogized the corpse-contact impurity to an evil spirit and explained that the process of ridding a possessed person of a malevolent spirit is the same as that of eradicating impurity. The Jewish students witnessing this encounter pressed their teacher after the gentile’s departure. They said: “You pushed him off with a reed! What will you say to us?” He responded, “By your lives, a dead person does not make things impure, and the water does not make things pure. Rather, God said, ‘I have engraved a rule, I have decreed a decree and you have no permission to transgress what I decreed, as it says ‘This is a ḥok of the Torah’.’”Footnote ⁷ Similarly, the midrashic recounting of a tale about a stumped King Solomon imagines Eccl. 7:23 as a statement of Solomon in response to the paradox of the red heifer. The following statement is attributed to Solomon, who is called the wisest of all men: “About all these things I have knowledge; but in the case of the story of the red heifer, I have investigated it, inquired into it, and examined it. I thought I could fathom it, but it eludes me” (Ecclesiastes 7:23).Footnote ⁸ Other midrashic works avoid addressing the overall enigma by focusing on detailed explanations of the rite’s attendant elements, like the definition of “unblemished” and “unyoked” (Num. 19:2) as well as the minutiae of the sacrifice, like the processes of burning and sprinkling.Footnote ⁹

One medieval midrashic work, Yalkut Shimoni, attempts to rationalize the precept, viewing it as reparation for the Israelite sin of worshipping the golden calf (Exod. 32). Using a fable to explain why the red heifer is the only sacrifice that is mandated to be female, the midrashic author tells of a young servant boy who made a mess in a royal palace. The king rules that the boy’s mother should clean up after her son. So too, reasons the midrashic author, God designated the female heifer to atone for the sin of the male calf.Footnote ¹⁰ The same work also offers a symbolic reading of the commandment as a prefiguration of historical vicissitudes, with the heifer representing the Israelites, and the absence of a yoke, the slaughter, and the incineration symbolizing historical tragedies for Israelites and Jews.Footnote ¹¹ While the early and medieval midrashic collections provide analyses of the commandment by mining each element of the rite for significance, they fail to transcend the minutiae and offer a generalized, holistic reason for the commandment.

These different midrashic readings are all cited in the medieval Bible commentary of Rabbi Solomon b. Isaac of Troyes (Rashi, twelfth century, Northern France), but, even in the face of these different potential solutions, Rashi concludes that the commandment remains inexplicable. He describes the heifer ceremony as a reparative antithesis of the golden calf, attributing this interpretation to the school of Moses ha-Darshan (eleventh century, Narbonne). Like the Yalkut Shimoni, the reading attributed to Moses ha-Darshan juxtaposes each of the narrative elements of the red heifer sacrifice against those of the golden calf, which was made by Aaron at the behest of the Israelites when Moses was on Mount Sinai, to highlight the two episodes as inversions of one another. Rashi quotes Moses saying: “Just as the Israelites contributed their own golden jewelry to cast the calf (Exod. 32:3), so too must the red heifer belong to an individual as private property.”Footnote ¹² For Moses, the heifer’s red color recalls a prophetic allusion to sinful ruddiness, while its purity hints at the Israelite state prior to making the golden calf. The prohibition against using a heifer that has ever borne a yoke corresponds to the Israelite refusal to bear “the yoke of heaven,” a rabbinic expression for observance of the Torah law.Footnote ¹³

Despite Rashi’s preservation of the midrashic interpretation of the heifer as atonement for the golden calf, he ultimately undercuts the force of this midrashic rationalization by referring to the meta-classification of the commandment as a ḥok, a statute with an unknowable rationale, which he buttresses with a different Talmudic tale about the biblical scapegoat. Rashi’s gloss on the heifer states: “Because Satan and the nations of the world taunt Israel, saying, ‘What is this command and what reason is there for it?’ On this account, it [Scripture] writes the term ‘statute’ (ḥukkah) about it, implying: It is an enactment from before Me; you have no right to criticize it.”Footnote ¹⁴ The final phrase, “It is an enactment (gezerah) from before Me; you have no right to criticize it,” is taken from a Talmudic discussion of the scapegoat, an expiatory goat cast into a ravine, as described in Lev. 16:1–34.Footnote ¹⁵ The Talmudic discussants conclude that the term “enactment” (gezerah), like ḥukkah/ḥok, categorically implies a divinely-ordained unknowable reason.Footnote ¹⁶ By providing an additional example of a biblical ceremony that can seem meaningless to humans but is, nevertheless, divinely ordained, Rashi imparts the message that no interpretation is truly satisfactory or worthy of pursuit.

Rashi’s comment on Num. 19:2 offers a mélange of exegetical approaches, including midrashic and halakhic observations drawn from the mishnaic discussions of the commandment, but his only truly original contribution makes reference to the mockery of Jewish observance by Satan and the nations of the world. Given Rashi’s Christian context and polemical inclinations, could the “nations of the world” hint at Christian mockery of Jewish interpretive practices? As we saw, Maimonides saw the red heifer as a harbinger of the messiah. Rashi’s evocation of it as a kind of scapegoat parallels Christian understanding of the role of their own messiah. If the red heifer indeed held messianic significance to medieval Jews, could Rashi’s definitive statement about the inexplicable nature of a ḥok be meant to refute Christian claims that messiah had already arrived in the form of Jesus? For Christian readers, this confounding ritual lent itself to allegorical and tropological readings, so Rashi may have directed his comment toward his own co-religionists who were experiencing doubts about their own religious principles.Footnote ¹⁷

The Maiomodean Revolution

The tentative attempts to explain the heifer ritual by midrashic anthologies and medieval scholars tend to reinforce the inexplicable nature of the heifer because of its status as a ḥok. For Maimonides, who claims that every commandment has an intelligible reason, the heifer represents an anomaly in the system. His failure to provide a reason, so uncharacteristic for Maimonides, goads his disciples to attempt to rationalize the commandment. Maimonides authored three important books that relate to the enumeration and nature of the commandments, and he mentions the heifer in all three. Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah concisely delivers Jewish law (halakha) to the masses accompanied by explorations of the practical and theoretical planes of the commandments. This text, which demonstrates Maimonidean sensitivity to philosophy, history, ethics, and jurisprudence, describes the physical details that legally qualify a female cow for sacrifice, including its sex, size, color, and condition. The section—fifteen chapters in length—is in “Laws of Purity” since the heifer’s ashes are used to remove contamination from corpse contact. While Maimonides dictates the minutiae of every aspect of the sacrifice in Mishneh Torah, as befits a legal code, he does not offer any reflections on reasons for those elements.Footnote ¹⁸

Maimonides’s book of commandments, Sefer Ha-Mitzvot, introduces a new literary genre supplying historical, legal, or ethical reasons for the commandments in the Hebrew Bible, in accordance with his principle that God would not mandate actions or beliefs without a rational purpose.Footnote ¹⁹ Written concurrently with the Mishneh Torah in the 1170s, Sefer Ha-Mitzvot enumerates the 613 commandments, dividing them into positive commandments and negative ones (prohibitions). Explaining the positive commandment of the red heifer, Maimonides states: “And it is that He commanded us to process the red heifer, so that its ashes be ready for one who needs it for purification from the impurity of a corpse, as He said, ‘and it shall be for the congregation of the Children of Israel’ (Num. 19:9). And the laws of this commandment have already been explained in tractate Parah.”Footnote ²⁰ Maimonides curtly explains that the sacrifice was commanded to provide the Israelites with means to purify those contaminated by the dead but omits any rationale or reference to the purity/impurity paradox. Elsewhere in this same work, Maimonides discusses the reasons that some commandments are enigmatic, which offers a fascinating insight into his later pronouncement about the red heifer.

The final prohibition in Sefer Ha-Mitzvot is used by Maimonides to emphasize that while each commandment has a reason, that reason may be deliberately obscured. It concerns the limitations on an Israelite king who is forbidden from amassing excessive amounts of horses, wives, and money. Maimonides cites a Talmudic discussion that examines this prohibition in light of King Solomon’s habits. The Bible relays that King Solomon, considered the wisest man, had an extreme number of horses, wives, and funds, and this “counterevidence” is closely examined by Talmudic scholars aware of these prohibitions. They conclude that if the sagely King Solomon could not observe commandments whose rationales were clearly stated in the Bible, then regular people could not be held to such impossible standards. This conclusion forms the basis for the Talmudic discussion:

The Talmudic debate equates knowledge of a commandment’s reason with danger since an individual could decide that the reason is not applicable to his or her situation and, concomitantly, disobey the commandment. Drawing from the realm of philosophy, Maimonides maintains that all commandments have a rational explanation, but his inclusion of this Talmudic passage suggests that some reasons are obscured so as to maintain observance.Footnote ²² This is especially interesting in light of Maimonides’s later work, Guide of the Perplexed, which contains an expansive section about the commandments, including those whose reasons are obscure.Footnote ²³

Written around 1190, Guide of the Perplexed is a tripartite treatise that examines the intersection between philosophy and traditional Judaism through a focus on biblical terminology, allegorical readings of the Bible, and meditations on the commandments.Footnote ²⁴ Dividing the commandments into fourteen classes, Maimonides elucidates the purpose of each general class of commandment as well as individual ones, but he concedes that the red heifer commandment remains a mystery to him. He says: “I do not know at present the reason of any of these things; nor why cedar-wood, hyssop, and scarlet were used in the sacrifice of the red heifer (Num. 19:6); nor why a bundle of hyssop was commanded for the sprinkling of the blood of the Passover-lamb (Exod. 12:22). I cannot find any principle upon which to found an explanation why these particular things have been chosen.”Footnote ²⁵ Maimonides reiterates that the sacrifice of the heifer is necessary to purify the impure, but his acknowledged confoundment is uncharacteristic and notable.

Maimonides’s statement allowed most of his followers to likewise refrain from explaining the process of the red heifer ritual.Footnote ²⁶ Nevertheless, some of his disciples followed his dictum that commandments must all have a reason and attempted to supply one for this precept’s enigmatic rules. With the development of a distinct educational curriculum and ideology called Maimonideanism, the earlier reticence about the heifer was slowly replaced by thoughtful rationalizations, often crafted in a philosophical idiom.Footnote ²⁷

A cluster of late medieval Jewish rationalizations of the red heifer all emerge from disciples of the Maimonidean tradition. The Maimonidean intellectual revolution that posited a philosophical core at the center of Judaism had cascading effects on several disciplines, including the field of exegesis. Jewish philosophers developed a specific curriculum of study, a philosophical vocabulary, and a new genre of philosophical biblical commentary.Footnote ²⁸ This new school, propelled by the Maimonidean translator Samuel ibn Tibbon (ca. 1150–1230, southern France), produced elaborate biblical commentaries whose allegorical readings revealed philosophical depths encased in scripture.Footnote ²⁹ Also, the school promoted a sharp divide between the philosophically-trained elites who could intellectually apprehend truth and the popular masses who could not handle such truths.Footnote ³⁰ One of the Jewish thinkers inspired by the Maimonidean tradition, refracted through the multi-generational translators of the Ibn Tibbon family, was Immanuel of Rome, a late medieval poet and exegete from the Italian peninsula.

Immanuel of Rome: On the Red Heifer

Immanuel of Rome was a Roman Jewish poet who likely spent much of his life across the peninsula in the Le Marche region. Immanuel’s fascination with vernacular romance poetry is evident throughout his Maḥberot Immanuel, a curated Hebrew poetic anthology containing twenty-eight chapters of rhymed prose interspersed with metric poetry that showcases myriad examples of Immanuel’s experimentation with vernacular lyric forms and imagery. Written in the early fourteenth century, Maḥberot Immanuel includes Hebrew sonnets, the earliest known translations of that lyric form emergent from the Sicilian court of Emperor Frederick II, as well as a Hebrew celestial tour loosely modelled on Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Footnote ³¹ Like many medieval poets, Immanuel’s biographical details are almost entirely unknown, but recent studies have placed him squarely in the fourteenth century.Footnote ³² In addition to new manuscript evidence, Immanuel’s recourse to the Petrarchan model of the sonnet together with his exposure to the Divine Comedy suggest a later date than the previously proposed lifespan of the 1260s to the 1330s.Footnote ³³ Together with his copious Hebrew poetry, Immanuel also composed poetry in Italian, of which only five exemplars are currently known.Footnote ³⁴ The immense popularity of Immanuel’s Hebrew poetry is evident even two hundred years later when a rabbinic authority, Rabbi Joseph Karo, prohibited the reading of Immanuel’s book on the Sabbath.Footnote ³⁵

Known mostly as an eminent Hebrew poet, Immanuel produced many more pages of biblical commentary than poems. He composed different types of commentaries: both book-length full commentaries and briefer occasional glosses, called biurim, but all his commentaries cycle between multiple modalities of reading the biblical text.Footnote ³⁶ Immanuel addresses his multi-modal methodology in his explanation of the four rivers that emerge from Eden (Gen. 2:10). He states:

This interpretation of the four rivers encapsulates Immanuel’s exegetical method, allowing multiple truths to coexist within different modes of interpretation. Although Immanuel affirms the existence of the four rivers in the world, a symbolic reading reveals esoteric truths while maintaining the integrity of the literal verse. The rivers exist, but an allegorical reading of the number four also alludes to the four material elements whose admixture forms all matter.Footnote ³⁸ As an embodiment of an actual place in nature and a symbol of the four elements, the Edenic rivers enable Immanuel to infuse principles of natural science and philosophy into his literal reading of the biblical text.

An adherent of the Maimonidean tradition, Immanuel was an avid consumer of philosophical writings and scientific theories, which he reworked into his biblical commentaries and narrative poetry. He blended this dense philosophical material with more traditional biblical insights, which are drawn from the commentaries of Abraham ibn Ezra (ca. 1089–1167) and Rashi (ca. 1040–1105).Footnote ³⁹ Home to vibrant Jewish and Christian communities, the city of Rome was a site where the exchange of ideas and texts transcended religious identity. In the twelfth century, as shown by Marie Thérèse Champagne, a deacon named Nicolaus Maniacutius corrected Jerome’s version of the Psalter using the Hebrew Bible and his own consultations with a Jewish scholar, perhaps Abraham ibn Ezra.Footnote ⁴⁰ Immanuel does not mention discussions with Christian prelates, but he does utilize several Hebrew translations of Latin works that exposed him to the scholastic philosophy of his time.Footnote ⁴¹ One such example is the translated corpus of Judah Romano whose translations of Latin philosophical, medical, and scientific works, as well as the Liber de causis, are highly visible throughout Immanuel’s commentaries.Footnote ⁴² Ever the textual omnivore, Immanuel incorporated philosophical and scientific excerpts from Maimonides as well as from the Latin tradition into his biblical commentaries, and he frequently highlights his exegeses in his poetry, intertextually referencing particular verses or passages of significance.Footnote ⁴³ The intricate relationship between Immanuel’s poetry and exegesis has received some attention but deserves even more.Footnote ⁴⁴

The Torah commandments are frequently mentioned throughout Immanuel’s commentaries, especially within the context of an individual’s lifelong intellectual journey toward perfection, defined as conjunction or union between the agent intellect and the rational part of the human soul.Footnote ⁴⁵ This conjunction was depicted as an ideal state in which the human intellect perceives all knowledge and was equated with immortality since “the material intellect will become immortal and everlasting.”Footnote ⁴⁶ While Immanuel identifies the acquisition of truths as a lifelong endeavor leading to the ultimate perfection, immortality, he conceives of the Mosaic commandments both as purveyors of said truths and regulations intended to modulate extreme behaviors which, if observed, are the precondition for attaining perfection. Immanuel follows Maimonides in explaining the purpose of Torah commandments, invoking the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean from Maimonides’s Eight Chapters and Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot De’ot when he states: “they moderate the virtues (middot) and distance [one] from the extremes.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Maimonides identifies particular commandments as either promoting true beliefs or improving communal wellbeing to foster a proper environment for intellectual development. Devoid of any theurgical value, observance of commandments has no effect on God or the human soul, but it remains purposeful as God never mandates anything in vain. Immanuel’s reading of Ps. 68:14 states: “What is aimed at thereby is that its [the intellect’s] faculties were prepared, and the commandments were given to the holy people to perfect the two existences within us, that is, the perfection of the body and the perfection of the soul.”Footnote ⁴⁸ His interpretation of Prov. 31 notes:

Thus, in addition to moral perfection and study of the sciences emphasized in his commentary on Song of Songs, Immanuel considered the fulfillment of biblical commandments as an essential precursor to the soul’s ultimate beatitude. For Maimonides, conjunction is an extremely difficult state to achieve, and only a few individuals “seek a state of perpetual permanence according to what is required by their noble form.”Footnote ⁵⁰ For him, Moses alone attained this rank, reflecting his stature in Maimonidean thought as a unique prophet-philosopher who reached the apex of human wisdom.Footnote ⁵¹ Scholars disagree as to whether Maimonides considers conjunction an attainable goal for human beings or solely maintains it as an aspirational end for unique individuals, like Moses.Footnote ⁵² Although Immanuel acknowledges the arduous path to conjunction and the natural prerequisite of disposition, he is more explicit than Maimonides on this point.

Immanuel’s Song of Songs commentary expresses the belief that conjunction can be attained during one’s life, stating: “the conjunction of the human intellect with the Agent Intellect is possible, for a person’s soul does not desire and imagine an impossible thing.”Footnote ⁵³ He maintains that the sublime soul conjoined with the Agent Intellect will be “above time and see the paths of time below it.”Footnote ⁵⁴ For Immanuel, conjunction is a challenging mystical experience to attain but theoretically accessible to human beings. This stance, while reflective of Maimonides’s ambiguity, echoes intellectual developments current in the Roman Jewish ambience, which blended Maimonidean theories with newer ones drawn from Christian scholastic philosophy. The intellectual circle in Rome, called philosophical rationalism by Giuseppe Sermoneta, was comprised of Jewish thinkers who blended Maimonidean rationalism with traditional mysticism.Footnote ⁵⁵ Sermoneta shows that adherents of this circle strove for union with the Agent Intellect, attempting to attain such a state through withdrawal from practical occupations and sensibilia, mastery of various philosophical disciplines, and preparation of the intellect. Sermoneta also identifies a core text, the pseudo-Aristotelian Liber de Causis, which—when studied in depth—this circle believed would trigger the process of conjunction. Sermoneta’s study of this circle credits Judah Romano, the translator of the Liber de Causis, with the evolution from a study group into a more formal association.Footnote ⁵⁶ Immanuel’s particular concern with the human intellect’s actualization and its ability to know universal truths signals his willingness to transcend Maimonidean thought and to engage with the Neoplatonic-inflected Aristotelianism of the Latin scholastics.Footnote ⁵⁷ This amalgamation of Maimonideanism and scholasticism is also evident in Immanuel’s unique reading of the heifer precept, which, I argue, also draws from the newer Christian context of mendicant preaching.

Immanuel’s approach to the red heifer presents an unusual case, as Immanuel utilizes both his typical exegetical formats—complete commentary (perush) and short gloss (biur)—to offer a novel reading of the precept. Immanuel’s complete commentary on Num. 19 advances a peshat or literal reading of the main verses (vv.1–10), followed by a more expansive philosophical and allegorical approach. His biurim, a collection of brief exegetical comments surviving in eleven manuscripts, explores a wide and varied range of topics from biblical verses to Mishnaic statements to topical themes, like Metatron the angel or the Temple altar.Footnote ⁵⁸ Within this collection, the red heifer comment is one of the longest expositions, together with an allegorical treatment of wine preserved in grapes from the time of creation.Footnote ⁵⁹ The biur on the heifer presents a holistic treatment of the rite while the complete commentary proceeds, line by line, to examine each verse, often splicing together comments from other commentators. In the latter, there are acknowledged citations of the eleventh-century northern French sage, Rashi, and the twelfth-century Iberian polymath, Abraham ibn Ezra, as well as unacknowledged citations of Maimonides’s Sefer ha-Mitzvot (Book of the Commandments) on the individual commandment of the red heifer as well as more general comments about the category of impurity (ṭumah). The bulk of the complete commentary, however, is not original. It reproduces almost the entire “heifer portion” (Parshat parah) sermon from Jacob Anatoli’s Malmad ha-Talmidim (A Goad for Students), which is a homiletical collection organized around the weekly Torah portion.Footnote ⁶⁰

Jacob Anatoli, (ca. 1180s–1240s), a translator, homilist, and son-in-law of the famed Maimonidean translator Samuel ibn Tibbon, examines both the ritual of the red heifer and its attendant elements in his Malmad HaTalmidim. Jacob explicates the red heifer ceremony in his sermon for Shabbat Parah, the Sabbath of Red Heifer, one of the special Sabbaths preceding Passover in which Num. 19:1–22 is read in addition to the Torah portion.Footnote ⁶¹ In the Parshat Parah sermon, Anatoli begins by justifying his own daring attempt to provide a reason where the master Maimonides could not. He urges his audience to pursue the explanation of this precept, despite the inability of sage Solomon to do so by noting: “many times you seek something that is in between your eyes but do not find it, while a young child finds it for you.”Footnote ⁶² So too, explains Jacob, “many times a lowly student is able to rationalize something even when a prominent master cannot.”Footnote ⁶³

Malmad HaTalmidim is a homiletical anthology whose sermons weave a connection between a given Torah reading and some verse or excerpt from wisdom literature, usually Proverbs or Psalms. For his heifer homily, Jacob chose to expound Ps. 147:10 (“He does not prize the strength of horses, nor value the thighs of men”), a verse affirming divine rejection of physical symbols of strength, which is followed by a subsequent verse avowing divine love for the God-fearing and needy. At first glance, this verse has neither any relation to the ceremony of the red heifer nor to the themes of purification, but Anatoli’s reading forges a link between the two disparate biblical passages ultimately delivering a powerful moral message to his audience. The ritual incineration of the heifer together with cedar wood, hyssop, and scarlet thread signifies utter destruction of all matter in the universe, a message also conveyed by the Psalms verse about divine disfavor of the mighty and strong. Jacob also offers a historical survey of Jewish cultural attitudes toward care for the dead and relates that to the role of fresh water in the heifer ceremony.

Next, Jacob transitions to a more philosophical tone, reading the heifer rite as revealing a “true belief” that “human perfection comes only from one’s soul.”Footnote ⁶⁴ He notes that while the body protects and shelters the soul, and thus is worthy of respectful treatment after death, the body’s inevitable mortality and decomposition underscores its materiality. In the burning and destruction of the material elements in the ritual (cedar wood, hyssop, and scarlet thread), the red heifer ceremony is a reminder that everything made of matter ultimately ceases to exist. This reminder, in turn, reinforces the importance of immaterial goals like Torah study and observance. The ingredients added to the fire represent the entire range of matter—spanning from the immense cedar to the diminutive hyssop plant—to include all existents composed of the four elements. Through the opulence of scarlet thread which signifies wealth, Jacob declares yet another symbol of material success that does not transcend this lifetime. For Jacob, the red heifer is an embodiment of material success and worldly serenity that compellingly seems to denote achievement. Yet, its incineration and concoction with fresh water, representative of Torah, conveys the impermanence of material success and the assertion that only an intellectual and spiritual path leads one to true success: immortality.

Jacob does not merely justify the material objects used in the ritual, but he also addresses the paradox at the heart of the ritual: the fact that the same ash-infused waters that purify the community render its handlers impure. In order to rationalize the process by which a purifying substance can bestow impurity upon its handlers, he explains it as divine artifice designed to highlight the heifer’s materiality to prevent people from worshipping the heifer itself as a power-infused deity. Even though Jacob does not refer to earlier interpretations of the statute here, his argument recalls rabbinic readings of the red heifer as a cathartic corrective to worship of the golden calf.Footnote ⁶⁵ By rendering all the sacrifice’s handlers impure, Jacob notes, God was indirectly motivating people to consider the purpose and intention of this commandment. Jacob’s allegorical reading proceeds from his close attention to the literal sense of the verses, but he resorts to a non-literal answer that has no basis in the biblical text.

In light of Maimonides’s inability or refusal to offer a reason for the enigmatic precept of the heifer, one must ask what compelled Jacob Anatoli to offer both a moralistic-philosophical as well as a historical rationale. This radical divergence from Maimonides likely reflects Jacob’s Christian environment. The larger sermon—focused on Ps. 147:10—offers Jacob a chance to address social and religious challenges plaguing his audience. In claiming that this verse “removes extreme doubt from the hearts of people who, upon seeing evil coming to the righteous and goodness to the wicked, doubt the existence of divine providence in this world,” Jacob suggests the message that divine love does not necessarily follow might, but rather meekness, comforts Jews with festering doubts.Footnote ⁶⁶ Could this be a veiled apologetic reference to reinforce Jews battered by Christian imagery and ideology conveying Christian supersession over Judaism? In various eras and sources, most notably relayed by the Hebrew Crusade chronicles, anti-Jewish violence and expulsions were justified by Christians as a punishment for the Jewish rejection of Christ.Footnote ⁶⁷ When Jacob notes that such Jewish doubt is the result of protracted time in a diasporic condition, when “learning dwindles and faith is dejected,” could Jacob be referring to the conditions Jews lived under during his time?Footnote ⁶⁸ Both the psalm and its highlighted verse are read as conveying the superficiality of physical appearance and the view that material success is “bestial” rather than “humanistic.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Here, the horse and the heifer serve as tangible symbols for the bestial materiality that is celebrated by the mighty.

Another potential source of inspiration comes from Jacob’s own biography, especially his movement from Provence to Naples, which aided in the diffusion of the Maimonidean ideology and curriculum.Footnote ⁷⁰ Most importantly, for purposes of this article, Jacob’s involvement in the imperial court of Frederick II (1194–1250) places him in a Neapolitan environment when he wrote his sermon on the red heifer.Footnote ⁷¹ Perhaps drawn to this topic because of his interest in animals, the avid falconer, Emperor Frederick II, offered his perspective on the heifer rite, as attested by Kalonymos ben Kalonymos, the Provençal Jewish philosophical translator and poet (fl. 1300). Kalonymos recounts an oral tradition that Frederick rationalized the red heifer to Samuel ibn Tibbon by explaining it as a Sabian pagan ritual, in which the ashes of the incinerated heifer, too, purify the impure.Footnote ⁷² Frederick’s own interest in the heifer, and especially his identification of it as a pagan ritual, might have spurred Jacob Anatoli to reclaim the heifer for a Jewish audience, using philosophical allegory to offer a deep message about the relationship between body and soul. Whereas Maimonides had explained the rationale behind many biblical precepts as encouraging Israelite abandonment of its cultural sensibilities that had been forged in a pagan or Sabian environment, post-Maimonidean philosophers sought ahistorical reasons.Footnote ⁷³ Their embrace of a more naturalistic perspective reflected the sense that a divine law should contain precepts whose reasons were eternal and not tied to historical circumstance. The allegorical intent of the heifer rite, as explained by Anatoli, certainly conforms to Ḥayim Kreisel’s claim that post-Maimonidean philosophers rejected historical rationalizations of the commandments. And yet, the polemical undertones of Anatoli’s sermon, whether against Christian challengers who inspire doubt or against the pagan origin of the rite, are unavoidably striking.

Immanuel frames his large extract from Anatoli between two sections of midrashic rabbinic material, drawn predominantly from Rashi and ibn Ezra.Footnote ⁷⁴ Such a multi-modal approach, both philosophical and exegetical, is characteristic of Immanuel’s commentaries, which typically explore both literal exegetical readings and allegorical philosophical significances. But what makes the red heifer discussion especially interesting is Immanuel’s unusual return to rabbinic midrashim again after his philosophical explanation, effectively bracketing the allegorical philosophical interpretation in between two sections of Rashi citations. Only one sentence in Immanuel’s monographic commentary appears to be original: the reason that the heifer must be female. He explains since matter is coded as female, and the heifer represents the material human body, the Torah commanded a female cow to be sacrificed.

Immanuel’s engagement with the medieval commentaries that focus on the literal sense of the verses, those of Rashi and Abraham ibn Ezra, can be characterized as expansionist. Immanuel clarifies and expands Ibn Ezra’s terse comments and Rashi’s staccato remarks. Except for a few phrases, Immanuel’s commentary on Num. 19 presents an elegant pastiche of literal, allegorical, and midrashic readings of the red heifer that proceed from a verse-by-verse explication, but none of those readings are original to Immanuel. Based on this commentary, we might dismiss Immanuel as merely a compiler on this topic had he not written about the red heifer ceremony in another context. As brief exegetical comments on a variety of sources, Immanuel’s biurim generically resemble the commentaries of Judah Romano, but it is unclear whether Immanuel was inspired by Judah or whether the biur genre was conventional in Italy.Footnote ⁷⁵ The text lacks the typical polish of Immanuel’s full-length commentaries, but its topical sweep from biblical to Mishnaic texts is vast. In at least one manuscript version, there are footnotes at the bottom of the page referring to other sources on the same topic, suggesting that this was a notebook of sorts. Overlap between the language of the biurim and Immanuel’s complete commentaries assures us that Immanuel is indeed the author, but the explanation in the red heifer biur diverges quite notably from Immanuel’s commentary on Num. 19.

Unlike the full-length commentary that proceeds in the order of the verses, this biur treats the topic more holistically. It is divided into two parts. The first part posits the red heifer as a symbol of an arrogant man who shirked the ‘burden’ of divine service. Meant to humble the “proud and arrogant ones,” the red heifer ceremony reminds them that they came from earth and shall return to it, recalling Jacob Anatoli’s sermon that also posited the cow’s sacrifice as a spur to humility. It becomes clear, however, that Immanuel only crafted this first part as a strawman argument, only to be surpassed by his “ḥidush niflah,” his novel insight into the meaning of the ceremony in the second part of the biur. The strawman argument deserves some attention, however, because of its similarity to another Roman Jewish gloss of the heifer by a fourteenth-century liturgical poet, Daniel ben Judah Ha-Dayan of Rome.Footnote ⁷⁶ Immanuel’s reading of the red heifer engages with Daniel’s explication but ultimately rejects it as unsatisfactory in order to advance his own novel approach to the red heifer.

For Daniel, like Rashi before him, the secret of the red heifer lies in proper understanding of another enigmatic biblical ritual involving livestock: the scapegoat for Azazel (Lev. 16:5–10). According to the Bible, the high priest takes two goats and designates one for the Lord and the other for Azazel. The Lord’s goat is sacrificed as a sin offering on behalf of the people, and the wandering goat, also expiatory, is sent off into the wilderness. By the second temple period, this ceremony became associated with the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, and the wandering goat was cast into a ravine and killed.Footnote ⁷⁷ Rabbinic literature often paired the scapegoat with the red heifer because both involve purification rituals and because both rites appear nonsensical.Footnote ⁷⁸ Daniel classifies both ceremonies as secrets of the sages (sod ḥakhamim), expounding them as rituals meant to incite reflection and repentance, especially on Yom Kippur, since “the human intellect follows practical actions.”Footnote ⁷⁹

In Daniel’s allegorical reading, the heifer symbolizes an individual who lives in a gray zone by pursuing material pleasures while avoiding outright sin. Daniel isolates each ritual element and invests it with significance, so the heifer’s purity, symbolizing an individual’s avoidance of sin, is compromised by being unyoked. While one would expect the absence of a yoke to be a positive symbol, Daniel reads it instead as representing the individual’s circumvention of Torah study and observance. The enactment of the sacrifice outside the camp, according to Daniel, alludes to the individual’s “banishment from the area of the righteous” in the afterlife. The soul’s torture in the afterlife is indicated by the cow’s slaughter and total incineration, which alludes to “the destruction of the spirit and the incineration of the soul.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Daniel intertextually aligns each step in the ceremonial preparation of the red heifer and purifying waters with the Talmudic narrative about the afterlife found in BT Rosh Hashana 17a. There the souls of the rebellious are judged in Gehenna for twelve months and subjected to burning and a scattering of their ashes at the feet of the righteous. The red heifer ceremony, according to Daniel, corresponds with each step detailed in this Talmudic narrative, so that even the collection of the cow’s ashes by a pure person refers to the pulverized wicked souls, who are in the prayers and at the feet of the righteous. Whereas earlier readings, like that of Jacob Anatoli, viewed the heifer as a symbol of a sinful person alive in the world, Daniel introduces a new aspect into his reading: the heifer rite represents events in the afterlife.

Daniel’s explanation of how something can simultaneously convey purity and impurity reveals his view of both the rationale and the essence of the sacrifice. The impurity from the heifer’s preparation represents the virulence of material delights, which separates an individual from the righteous in the afterlife. This reading reinforces Daniel’s perception that the heifer ceremony conducted in this world alludes to metaphysical processes after death. The other side of the paradox, however, uses post-mortem metaphysical truths to inspire ethical behavior in this world. Daniel states: “The wicked, who know of this sinless individual’s sentence to be consumed and judged for a fixed period in Gehenna, shall think: ‘What will be done to us, who have transgressed often and gravely?’ They will regret their sins and return completely to be purified [so as] to have the standing of the righteous and pious.”Footnote ⁸¹ Like Jacob Anatoli, Daniel ben Judah Ha-Dayan frames the red heifer sacrifice as a call to penitence. Unlike Anatoli’s reading, which targets arrogance, Daniel’s approach focuses on extreme materialism.

Not much is known about Daniel ben Judah Ha-Dayan of Rome outside of his writings. In addition to his brief rationalization of the Azazel ritual and the red heifer, Daniel also composed a short excursus on key words in the liturgy as well as an exegetical piece on two contradictory verses in the Genesis creation narrative.Footnote ⁸² His most significant contribution to Jewish thought is his poetic rendition of the Maimonidean principles of faith, a liturgical poem known as May the Living Lord be Magnified (Yigdal Elohim Ḥay). Attested in prayerbooks from the fourteenth century, the poem was attributed to Daniel by Samuel David Luzzato (known by the acronym Shadal). For many years the poem’s authorship had been disputed because of a similar poetic rendition of Maimonides’s thirteen principles embedded in Maḥberot Immanuel, Immanuel’s poetic anthology.Footnote ⁸³ Immanuel may have targeted Daniel ben Judah Ha-Dayyan in an invective narrative poem, but the literary Maḥberot Immanuel cannot furnish us with anything more than conjectures.Footnote ⁸⁴ Still, it is notable that both Roman poets composed literary renditions of the Maimonidean creed that resembled each other enough to confuse generations of scholars.

The first part of Immanuel’s biur on the heifer restates Daniel’s interpretation, concluding with: “I have seen this interpretation of the red heifer over several months and years, but now a wondrous novel interpretation has come to me.”Footnote ⁸⁵ The novel interpretation is that the ceremony of the red heifer embodies the posthumous experience of a sinful soul that did not properly serve God, especially one whose sins destined the individual for a punishment of divine execution (karet).Footnote ⁸⁶ Like Jacob Anatoli and Daniel ben Judah ha-Dayan, in his biur Immanuel views the red heifer ceremony as a transformative rite meant to imbue viewers with certain values, like humility or repentance. Moving beyond both Jacob and Daniel, however, Immanuel adds an extra element, which reflects the Christian spiritual environment in which he resided.

According to Immanuel, the cow’s purity (temimut) alludes to the purity of soul and body at the beginning of a person’s life. The divine intellect imbues humans with all the necessary potentiality to achieve perfection, making them initially as pure as the red heifer. The problem, according to Immanuel, lies in the embodied soul’s rejection of Torah and its commandments, a state symbolized by the requirement to procure an unyoked cow. The slaughter of the cow, especially at the height of its physical condition, signifies that all creatures die, whether “unnaturally” in youth or more typically in old age. The cow’s incineration targets the souls of the wicked, conveying fear of spiritual punishment in the afterlife to them. Although Immanuel depicts an unforgettably material netherworld in his literary tour of hell and heaven, Maḥberet ha-Tofet V’Ha-Eden, his philosophically inflected commentaries—both the complete and the biur—reveal his embrace of a fully spiritual Maimonidean afterlife.Footnote ⁸⁷ The location of the sacrifice, outside the camp, signifies that the wicked soul will forever be denied membership in the eternal collective. The impurity of the wicked soul infects all others around it with impurity as well. According to Immanuel, this refers to the contamination of all participants in the red heifer ritual. Most unusual, however, is Immanuel’s explication of the other part of the paradox, namely, how does the mechanism of purification work? How are impure people made pure? Immanuel explains, “Since the sinners will be stirred away from their wicked deeds by the matter of the cow’s slaughter and incineration, and return to God, the ashes of the heifer purify the impure.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Immanuel envisions the purification of individuals as a form of repentance occurring while the sinners are still alive, as bystanders watching the ceremony will repent after witnessing the sacrifice and internalizing its significance.

Immanuel takes the meaning of the red heifer ceremony as he understands it—a ceremony that no one in his day could have experienced—and turns it into a call for a transformative religious education that will draw repentant sinners to penitence. How do these agents of change have an impact on repentant sinners? Immanuel calls for particular individuals to effect change in others by teaching them Torah and modeling the observance of the commandments. He explains:

By comparing the ministering biblical priests to “Sages, Knowers of Truth, and Masters of Justice and straightforwardness,” Immanuel explains that they give of their knowledge to the sinful soul to prevent that person from suffering spiritual punishment after death. With their knowledge of Torah, symbolized by the freshwaters (mayim ḥayim), these sages direct the sinful soul onto a straight path. Immanuel concludes by saying “do not think that these words were spoken as hyperbole and exaggeration to frighten and terrify the wicked … rather the matter is real and acceptable to the intellect.”Footnote ⁹⁰

Immanuel’s biur transforms intangible categories of purity and impurity—ṭumah and taharah—into practical aspects of sinfulness or repentance. While this concept was hinted at in the interpretations of Jacob Anatoli and Daniel ben Judah Ha-Dayan, it was never fully developed into a formal educational curriculum mediated by sage guides who assist a remorseful sinner to achieve full penitence. To be sure, Immanuel excludes certain categories of sinners, such as heretics, apostates, informers, and deniers of the Torah and resurrection. But, notwithstanding those sinners, penitence is accessible with the assistance of wise teachers and education.

There are no Jewish sources for Immanuel’s reading of the red heifer as pointing to a need for contemporary Jews to perform penance. Whereas previous explications of the heifer present a psychological or ethical character, Immanuel’s reading offers a sophisticated and highly developed penitential theory symbolized by the red heifer rite. Immanuel advances a non-literal reading that makes an inanimate thing (water) stand for human activity in preaching and teaching. Can this approach be understood merely as an evolution of an idea over time? A contemporary comment by the southern French biblical exegete, Nissim of Marseilles, suggests that this is not the case. Nissim advances a purely ethical reading of the heifer ritual.Footnote ⁹¹ Instead we find sources that could have inspired Immanuel in contemporary Christian exegesis of the same scriptural passage and in the phenomenon of medicant sermons in Italy that prescribed active penance to their hearers. Before we turn our attention to the role of the mendicant orders in spreading penitential sermons, let us explore the Christian interpretations of the red heifer.

Medieval Christian Readings of the Heifer

For medieval Christians, as for medieval Jews, biblical exegesis flourished in the twelfth century, and the case of the red heifer, an example of ‘absurd’ scripture, offered myriad opportunities for different reading techniques.Footnote ⁹² In the realm of Bible studies, where the text was subject to four different senses of interpretation, competing schools increasingly favored one sense of scripture over the others.Footnote ⁹³ Beryl Smalley notes a shift in Christian attitudes toward the precepts, extending even to those precepts that had no comprehensible reason. Whereas the late antique and early medieval Christian approach had been to mock Jewish observance of the Law as an indicator of Jewish blindness to the truth, twelfth-century theologians were more sympathetic to the Law as imbuing positive traits in those who observed it. Accompanying this shift is an exegetical trend to accept the validity of the literal or historical readings of the verse in addition to moral or allegorical ones. In their quest to validate the literal sense of Hebrew Scripture, some Christian theologians even turned to Jewish study partners for exegetical inspiration.

In Paris, which had robust communities of scholars and religious, the literal reading of Scripture was championed at the Abbey of St. Victor, and first by Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1141).Footnote ⁹⁴ Called a “second Augustine,” Hugh taught at the open school of St. Victor and wrote numerous theological and exegetical works, including notes on the Hebrew Bible.Footnote ⁹⁵ Although his Notulae, a collection of exegetical glosses on eight biblical books (Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, Ruth), do not explicitly mention the red heifer, they demonstrate Hugh’s regard for a historical and literal interpretation of Scripture.Footnote ⁹⁶ A similar interest in the literal sense of biblical verses emerges from Rome, where Nicolaus Maniacutius, a Cistercian monk, deacon, and Lateran canon, used the Hebrew Bible and its Jewish commentaries to understand the Psalms.Footnote ⁹⁷ The legal and ritual material of the Hebrew Bible had historically been read allegorically, but a renewed interest in the literal sense led masters to wrestle with the biblical verses as sources of both Jewish observance and contemporary resonance for Christians.Footnote ⁹⁸ Christian exegesis of the Hebrew Bible prior to the twelfth century, however, veered more toward allegorical and moral readings of the scripture than literal ones and such readings inform Immanuel of Rome’s approach to the heifer rite.

The Glossa Ordinaria on the Bible, compiled over the twelfth century, collated several patristic and contemporary commentaries, including the heavily allegorical interpretations of Augustine and Gregory the Great. Augustine’s allegorical gloss on Num. 19 in his Quaestiones in Heptateuch invests each detail of the narrative with Christological significance, equating the red heifer with the body of Christ.Footnote ⁹⁹ For Augustine, the heifer must be feminine because it signifies the weakness of flesh. Augustine glossed the prescriptions for the cow (red, unblemished, unyoked, female) as details of Christ’s body, while the ceremonial steps were symbolic of the crucifixion and the resurrection. He identifies the priest, Eleazar, as a prefiguration of future Christian priests and interprets the three objects burned with the heifer (cedarwood, hyssop, and scarlet thread) as symbolizing hope, faith, and charity, although he does not relate why each object connects with a particular theological virtue.

A late medieval visual source corroborating the Augustinian parallel between the red heifer and the crucified Christ is found in the Bible moralisée of Naples, a fourteenth-century vernacular illustrated Bible from the court of Joan I of Naples that is regarded as a faithful copy of the thirteenth-century exemplar.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The relevant page contains six scenes, the top three scenes illustrating the presentation and sacrifice of the heifer, as well as the sprinkling of waters of lustration. The bottom half of the page has three corresponding panels under each of the biblical scenes. They include the presentation of Christ to Pontius Pilate, the Crucifixion, and a gathering of sages around a cross. The accompanying text indicates an equivalence between Jesus and the red heifer. The group of sages includes Saints Peter, Paul, and Laurence, who sprinkled the people with their words and cured them of mortal sin.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Thus, the Bible’s visual program envisions a link between the crucifixion and saintly penance extended to the people. The connection between the red heifer and penance in Christian thought was diffuse and well established enough to be included in at least two moralized Bibles and the Glossa ordinaria.

The homilies of Gregory the Great reinvested the red heifer ritual with a moral interpretation that was influential among Christian readers. Gregory writes that “we sacrifice the red heifer when we remove the body from the desires of pleasure.”Footnote ¹⁰² Using the present tense, Gregory implies that the commandment is neither a relic of the Israelite past, nor merely a prefiguration of the Crucifixion, but rather a living precept that Christians follow when they reject carnal pleasures. The contemporary applicability of Gregory’s reading resonates in his explanation of the priest dipping his finger in the heifer’s blood and sprinkling it sevenfold against the Tabernacle door (Num. 19:4). Gregory defines the Tabernacle as “synagogue,” which indicates the contemporary nature of his message. An interpretation of the sprinkling attributed to Gregory by the Glossa Ordinaria, but absent from Gregory’s actual corpus, charges one “to announce the Passion to the unfaithful by perfect action and through effective preaching.”Footnote ¹⁰³ During biblical times, there was no synagogue, but rather a mobile Tabernacle or a stationary Temple. By reading the verse morally, Gregory removes it from its historical context in the Christian Old Testament and makes it applicable to contemporary Christians. When medieval Christians used the Glossa to learn how to interpret the Bible, they encountered the pericope of the red heifer as a prefiguration of the crucified Christ and as a ceremony that, when understood correctly, offered important insights into a spiritual life.

Oral and textual interactions between Jews and Christians concerning the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible are well-attested in twelfth-century Paris, Rome, and London.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Such exchanges continued in the thirteenth century, but in addition to the Aramaic Targum and the commentary of Rashi, Christian scholars were also introduced to Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed with its formidable section on the reasons for the commandments. The Dux neutrorum, a Latin translation of the Guide made from Judah Al-Harizi’s Hebrew translation, was completed around 1240. Recently, Lucy Pick attributed an even earlier partial translation of the Guide’s subsection on the commandments (3:29–30 and 32–49) to Michael Scot in an unedited treatise called the Liber de parabolis et de mandatis that she claims is a collaborative project conducted with Samuel ibn Tibbon around 1223–1224.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In that treatise, which explains how to read and interpret parables, the red heifer rite is mentioned, but no reason is given for the commandment or its attendant elements.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ According to Pick “the Guide presented scholars in Toledo with a God who worked through the principles of Aristotelian physics, and Maimonides’s Guide offered an incentive to translate and study those works of Aristotle and his interpreters that illuminated these questions. But it also gave them a way of thinking about their own Christian tradition as it related to Jewish Law.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ As such, scholastic interpretations of the Hebrew Bible, especially the commandments, were compelled to engage with the literal sense in new and unprecedented ways, often alongside more traditional allegorical readings.

One such example is evident in the work of William of Auvergne (ca. 1180–1249), a canon of Notre Dame in Paris and also bishop from 1228 onward, who was the first of the scholastics to use Maimonides’s Guide after encountering it in Michael’s Liber de parabolis et de mandatis. Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Before 1236, William of Auvergne wrote a pair of companion treatises treating Faith (De fide) and the laws (De legibus), in which he addresses Jewish and Islamic legal systems as well as the Gospels, which he viewed as the complete and perfect law. William’s interpretation of the red heifer precept reveals an awareness both of midrashic Jewish traditions and the newer mode of reading the Scripture philosophically, as gleaned from Maimonides. He identifies the heifer as a remembrance of the golden calf and cites the classical biblical verses from Hosea that compare the sinning Israelites to a wayward cow. For him, the burning of the heifer’s carcass together with aromatics like cedar and hyssop conveys that the sacrifice preserved the Israelites from the rotten stench of sin. Linking each of the accoutrements (cedar, hyssop, scarlet thread) to one of the four material elements (earth, fire, water, air), William maintains that any impurity caused by the admixture of the four elements shall be purified and cleansed by this sacrifice.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Thus, William’s use of midrashic symbolism, in the identification of the heifer with the golden calf, is balanced by his use of philosophical allegory, viewing the rite’s accessories as symbols of the natural elements.

An earlier explication of the red heifer by the French theologian William of Auxerre (1145–1231) explores the red heifer through the purity/impurity paradox with a specific focus on the priestly role. William explains that the heifer signifies the Eucharist, and the ministering priest’s impurity (Num. 19:7) conveys an important admonition to future priests who will celebrate the Eucharist. According to William, a celebrant must be aware of his thoughts after he celebrates the Eucharist, noting that “he ought to reflect continuously until evening, that is all the way to contrition which is the goal and the destruction of sin.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ When William cannot identify a literal reason for a biblical precept, he appeals to the category of “burden” (onus), a classification that affirms the verse’s utility in the absence of an obvious reason or cause. William explains that “there are many things in the law whose instructions have no literal cause other than difficulty and a scourge,” and while an allegorical approach yields a significant moral lesson, a literal reading of the heifer understands “that the impurity which tainted the priest from the incineration of the red calf was only instituted for difficulty.”Footnote ¹¹¹ William’s lesson about the priests is a far more satisfying message, but his inclusion of the literal reading demonstrates the continued significance of the literal sense.

Both William of Auvergne and William of Auxerre asserted the authority of the Hebrew Bible and its rabbinic interpretation for a valid understanding of the Christian literal sense, but they also maintained that the “error” of Jewish hermeneutics obscured the path to (Christian) truth. In his consideration of the validity of the sacraments of the Old Law, Dominican Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–1274) cites the red heifer as a nonsensical example, quoting Ecclesiastic. 34:4 (“What can be made clean by the unclean? And what truth can come from that which is false?”) to prove his point.Footnote ¹¹² Aquinas advances a multi-layered reading of the heifer ceremony in which each narrative element of the ceremony corresponds to a different aspect of his chosen theme. Aquinas’s literal reading, an echo of the midrashic approach, views the heifer sacrifice and incineration as atonement for the sin of idolatry, embodied by the Israelites’ worship of the golden calf. His allegorical exposition, however, views the red heifer as the figure of Christ, whose physical weakness and blood of the passion corresponds to the female sex and red color of the heifer. The heifer’s age and blemish-free state relate the innocence of Christ and his perfection. The choice of priestly handlers and the external location of the incineration mirror the deliverance of Jesus to the Israelite priests and his crucifixion outside the gate. Aquinas maps each narrative detail of the heifer ceremony onto a matching feature of the crucifixion, alluding to contemporaneous events, until the last line. In explaining why the sacrifice’s handlers remain impure “until the evening” in Num.19:8 and 19:10, Aquinas suggests that “the evening” refers to “the end of the world, when the remnants of Israel will be converted.”Footnote ¹¹³ For Aquinas, the red heifer ceremony simultaneously remains a historical relic of the Israelites’ idolatry and a figure of Christ, yet its message that “Jews became unclean through putting Christ to death” resounds beyond antiquity until the eventual conversion of all remaining Jews.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Like Aquinas, the Franciscan Bible scholar, Nicholas of Lyra (ca. 1270–1349), utilized Jewish texts in service of Christian exegesis of the Bible, demonstrating what Deeana Copeland Klepper calls “an ambivalence toward Jews as stubborn unbelievers who nonetheless held indispensable keys to understanding Christian Scripture.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Klepper identifies a marked interest in Hebrew among the mendicant movements in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but with two distinct purposes. The Dominicans used Hebrew for purposes of anti-Jewish polemical argumentation and missionizing, while the Franciscans were more interested in biblical scholarship and the literal interpretation of the Bible.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Nicholas’s commentary, Postilla super totam Bibliam, completed around 1331, introduced Hebrew and the commentary of Rashi to Christian students of Scripture.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Nicholas’s reading of the red heifer proceeds in the order of the verses and, like Rashi’s commentary, begins with fragments of a given verse. He offers a historical explanation of impurity and a study of its sources. The term and concept of ḥok seems to puzzle the Latin translator of the Hebrew Bible, because Num. 19:2 (“This is the ḥok that the Lord has commanded”) is translated as “this is the observance of the victim” (ista est religio victimae). Nicholas tries to clarify this verse by defining the term “religion” (religio). The reason for the heifer was, he explains: “because it was burned for the purification of the whole people so that they could access the cult of God which is called “religion” in the sacred scripture. And for that reason, this beast for sacrifice [was] specially named by the name of religion.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Although this curious comment does not reflect any Jewish source, Nicholas’s exegesis of the heifer generally follows the Victorine reading, including the incorporation of verses from Hosea that were classically invoked by rabbinic and midrashic sources, and viewing the heifer as a symbol of the golden calf. Nicholas’s commentary, together with the Glossa ordinaria, became the standard reference text for biblical study, and Christians acquired knowledge of midrash and rabbinic interpretations of the rite through it.Footnote ¹¹⁹

The rise of the mendicant movements in the thirteenth century with their emphasis on homiletics meant that a primary purpose of mendicant Bible study was to find material for effective preaching. This necessitated the introduction of a new genre of sermons and a formalized literature about preaching (ars praedicandi).Footnote ¹²⁰ Whereas traditional homilies offered a running commentary on extensive Biblical passages, the “modern sermon” (sermo modernus) focused on a theme, developing it through curated biblical examples and effective imagery. The new typology of sermon addressed “perceived pressing pastoral needs,” such as emerging lay piety and confrontations with heretics.Footnote ¹²¹ Typically, the sermo modernus aimed to endorse and kindle the faith of believers or to warn about heretical errors with an acute focus on virtue and vice and the associated rewards and punishments.Footnote ¹²²

The mendicants were tasked with preaching, often in the vernacular, to inspire repentance and conversion. Traveling throughout the Italian peninsula in pairs, friars were charged to deliver sermons on virtue and vice and to reward and punish in a way that would win converts rather than engaging in displays of erudition in public spaces. That the red heifer was a topic of sermons is attested anecdotally by its inclusion in a Dominican preaching manual.Footnote ¹²³ An example from the new ars praedicandi genre, Summa de exemplis ac similitudinibus rerum, a manual on similitudes by Giovanni di San Gimignano (ca. 1260–1332), provides preachers with similitudes or material examples that could be used to discuss spiritual concepts. This manual offers the red heifer as a memorable similitude for Christ.Footnote ¹²⁴

The Franciscan Peter di John Olivi (1248–1298) treats the red heifer ceremony in three different works, providing an example of the Christian reading of the red heifer ceremony that connects it directly to penance.Footnote ¹²⁵ He was a controversial theologian from Languedoc, identified with the Spiritual Franciscans, a group that harshly critiqued the Franciscan order for its turn to materialism in the latter years of Francis’s lifetime and after his death.Footnote ¹²⁶ Peter taught in Paris, Montpellier, and Florence, but rotated in and out of posts because of his controversial positions. He often expressed his desire for the conversion of the Jews to usher in an eschatological period of peace before the second coming of Christ. He also authored a treatise on usury that eventually authorized the creation of the Monte di Pietà, a church-sponsored lending institution intended to replace Jewish ‘usury.’Footnote ¹²⁷ Peter’s interest in “the blinded Synagogue” emerges from his work Treatise on Ceremonial Precepts (Tractatus cerimonialium), a text composed around 1291–1292, which examines the literal and spiritual reasons for the commandments. This work was part of an established genre of scholastic writing in the thirteenth century—inspired by William of Auvergne’s De legibus—in which Christians examined the “Old Law” of the Hebrew Bible for a better understanding of the historical ancient law and its spiritual resonance for contemporary Christians.Footnote ¹²⁸

In the Treatise on Ceremonial Precepts, Peter addresses the red heifer sacrifice in a chapter on the waters of expiation (De aqua expiationis).Footnote ¹²⁹ He parses the sacrificial ceremony step by step, offering both allegorical and mystical interpretations of the rite. Like the Jewish Midrash Yalkut Shimoni and Rashi, as well as Augustine, Hugh of St. Victor, and William of Auvergne, Peter also cites Hosea 4:16, comparing Israel to a stubborn cow. Unlike them, however, he identifies the red heifer as the idolatrous Synagogue. In his allegorical reading, Peter views the sacrifice of the heifer as atonement for the sin of idolatry. The cow alludes to the golden calf, the sprinkling of the blood represents the rejection of carnal and corrupt love, and the incineration of the unclean parts of the heifer—its flesh, skin, and dung—signify an abandonment of idolatry. Following the allegorical reading, Peter offers a mystical reading where the red heifer represents Christ, whose red blood and ashes expiate sin.Footnote ¹³⁰ In this reading, Peter defines the cedar, hyssop, and scarlet thread as virtues of hope, humility, and charity, as Augustine had done. Peter’s ideas were faithfully studied and transmitted in sermons of Bernardino da Siena (1380–1444), a late medieval Franciscan preacher whose inflammatory remarks about Jews (among others) often resulted in antagonism between local Jews and Christians.Footnote ¹³¹

The theme of penance that we see reflected in Immanuel’s reading of the red heifer mirrored general currents of the Christian society in which he lived. The mendicants had strong centers throughout Umbria and Le Marche, and groups like the Flagellants or the Bianchi circulated around central and northern Italy performing elaborate rituals of public penance to assist sinners onto the right path.Footnote ¹³² Between the public performances of such groups and vernacular mendicant sermons that urged penance, it would be impossible for Jews to remain unaware of such a penitential climate. Immanuel’s interpretation of the red heifer ceremony as one that inspires a bystander’s self-reflection and repentance, therefore, acquires a polemical valence that becomes evident in this local context.

Several aspects of Immanuel’s interpretation suggest that he was familiar with Christian exegesis. First, his interpretation of the heifer’s femaleness as symbolic of materiality recalls Augustine’s reading that a female heifer signifies the weakness of flesh.Footnote ¹³³ The exposition of the heifer by the apocalyptic theologian, Joachim of Fiore (1135–1202), likewise connects the heifer to the question of Christ’s incarnate form as female.Footnote ¹³⁴ Second, Immanuel’s interpretation of the heifer ceremony identifies the role of penitential guides who, through teaching Torah, bring sinners back to the rightful path. Immanuel seems to be proposing a Jewish alternative to the mendicant preachers, who undertook the conversion of wayward Christians from heterodoxy. For him, the living spectators of the heifer ceremony receive guidance from spiritual leaders in their pursuit of penance, and the heifer sacrifice “purifies the impure ones because when those whose souls who have sinned become aware, during their lifetimes, and internalize the sorrow intended for the sinful soul, then their stupidity will vanish and they will be purified after being impure.”Footnote ¹³⁵

Despite this astounding diversity of voices, it is important to note the enmeshment of all these readings with one another before reflecting on Immanuel’s alternate readings of the red heifer. The inscrutability of the red heifer commandment generated a sizeable exegetical response among both Jews and Christians. The heifer was variously said to symbolize purity, impurity, or spiritual apathy. The central element was viewed variously as the heifer’s sacrifice, the ministering priests, or the resulting waters of expiation. Some exegetes read the text historically, as referring solely to the past era of the Israelites, while others applied the precept to contemporary communities or to the afterlife. Rabbinic proof texts, like Hosea 4:16, appear in Christian explications, while Christian meditations on gender and corporeality surface in Jewish writings. And both Christians and Jews play with the literal and non-literal senses. There is no strict division here between “Jews of the letter” and “Christians of the spirit.” Such dynamic pathways attest to dialogue, both fruitful and polemical, between medieval exegetes of different confessions.

While Rabbinic and medieval Jews were reticent to explain this rite, seeming satisfied, until the post-Maimonidean period, to classify it as an enigma, Christians embraced its inscrutability and used the pericope to prefigure the Crucifixion. Nevertheless, beginning roughly in the thirteenth century, some medieval Jews and Christians advanced readings of the commandment that were similar to each other and that, moreover, diverged from the traditional explications in their respective communities. These explanations shared the idea that the red heifer embodied the atonement of sin. For medieval Christians, this interpretation was implicit in their reading of the heifer as Christ, whose death was understood to accomplish that very expiation. These new readings were transmitted through the study of the sacred page at universities and through the spread of vernacular sermons on penance. Immanuel of Rome’s interpretation of the text remained loosely linked with earlier ideas about the heifer as a sacrifice, but his emphasis in his biur on teachers of Torah as agents of repentance substantially reframes the traditional understanding of the heifer as an agent merely of sacrifice and catharsis.

As we saw above in two different commentaries on Num. 19, Immanuel advances two radically different interpretations of the red heifer rite. In his book-length commentary, he reproduced the traditional exegesis of Rashi and Abraham ibn Ezra, followed by an allegorical reading of the ritual as curbing potential arrogance, and ended his explanation with standard rabbinic statements. In his biur, Immanuel asserts that the rite had public significance as inspiring private penitence with special emphasis on the state of the soul. Some of Immanuel’s biurim were incorporated into his book-length commentary, but the instance of the red heifer was not. Why did Immanuel reserve his novel approach to the rite for the hortatory format of the biurim? Perhaps Immanuel was aware of the sermo modernus, newly popularized by mendicant preachers.Footnote ¹³⁶ In his poetic anthology, Maḥberot Immanuel, he claims to have preached public sermons on Yom Kippur.Footnote ¹³⁷ Although we cannot be certain of his claim, as it was made within a fictional genre, the red heifer biur offers us a tempting clue with which to corroborate that statement. Instead of a verse-by-verse explication for the sake of explaining the entire scriptural chapter, which Immanuel provides in his book-length Numbers commentary, the red heifer biur revolves around the theme of penitence as effected by this ceremony. We can read Immanuel’s biur as a response and reaction to the claims made in Christian exegesis and sermons about the red heifer. In particular, his novel exegesis may have been a response to Christian assertions that the red heifer was Christ himself.

Tracing the exposition of the red heifer commandment in Jewish and Christian thought reveals that while Jewish and Christian exegetical communities interpreted the heifer differently, this was at times done with a deep awareness of each other’s readings. An enigmatic biblical ceremony that lost its religious significance with the destruction of the Temple in the first century CE, the red heifer was a symbol waiting to be invested with meaning. In the wake of Maimonides’s invitation in the Guide of the Perplexed to provide reasons for all precepts but failure to rationalize this particular precept, his disciples rushed to fill the gap that he had left. One of these disciples, Immanuel of Rome, was not only inspired by Maimonides but seems also to have been influenced by contemporary currents in Christian exegesis, evident in the vernacular sermons offered by the newly formed mendicant orders who preached a doctrine of personal penance that finds its way into his biur on Num. 19.