All of you who have killed a person or touched the dead are to remain outside the camp for seven days. On the third day and the seventh day you are to purify both yourselves and your captives.
19. And do ye abide without the camp seven days. We have elsewhere seen, See ante, on Numbers 19:11, vol. 2, p. 42. that, if any one had touched a dead body, he was accounted unclean. Moses, by now extending the ceremony of expiation to lawful homicide, intimates how carefully we ought to abstain from shedding human blood.
And Eleazar the priest said unto the men of war, which went to the battle,.... To all the soldiers, officers, and common men: this is the ordinance of the law, which the Lord commanded Moses; concerning the purification of unclean persons and things, hereby confirming what Moses had said.
abide without the camp seven days: whosoever hath killed any person . . . purify both yourselves and your captives--Though the Israelites had taken the field in obedience to the command of God, they had become defiled by contact with the dead.