‏ Leviticus 21:10

Lev 21:10-12

The high priest was to maintain a spotless purity in a higher degree still. He, whose head had been anointed with oil, and who had been sanctified to put on the holy clothes (see Lev 8:7-12 and Lev 7:37), was not to go with his hair flying loose when a death had taken place, nor to rend his clothes (see Lev 10:6), nor to go in to any dead body (מת נפשׁת souls of a departed one, i.e., dead persons); he was not to defile himself (cf. Lev 21:2) on account of his father and mother (i.e., when they were dead), nor to go out of the sanctuary funeris nempe causa (Ros.), to give way to his grief or attend the funeral. We are not to understand by this, however, that the sanctuary was to be his constant abode, as Bähr and Baumgarten maintain (cf. Lev 10:7). “Neither shall he profane the sanctuary of his God,” sc., by any defilement of his person which he could and ought to avoid; “for the consecration of the anointing oil of his God is upon him” (cf. Lev 10:7), and defilement was incompatible with this. נזר does not mean the diadem of the high priest here, as in Exo 29:6; Exo 39:30, but consecration (see at Num 6:7).
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