Charles Ellicott Commentary Leviticus 21:1

"And Jehovah said unto Moses, Speak unto the priests, the sons of Aaron, and say unto them, There shall none defile himself for the dead among his people;" — Leviticus 21:1 (ASV)

And the Lord said unto Moses. —The laws about the purity and holiness of the Jewish community, and of every individual lay member, enacted in Leviticus 11:1 to Leviticus 20:27, are now followed by statutes respecting the purity and holiness of the priesthood who minister in holy things on behalf of the people, and who, by virtue of their high office, were to be models of both ceremonial and moral purity.

Speak unto the priests the sons of Aaron. —Moses is ordered to communicate these statutes to the priests as the sons of Aaron. The peculiar phrase “the priests the sons of Aaron,” which only occurs here—since in all other six passages in the Pentateuch it is the reverse, “the sons of Aaron the priests” (Leviticus 1:8; Leviticus 1:11; Leviticus 2:2; Leviticus 3:2; Numbers 10:8), is designed to inculcate upon them the fact that they are priests by virtue of being the sons of Aaron, and not because of any merit of their own, and that they are to impress the same sentiments upon their descendants.

This fact, moreover, as the authorities during the second Temple remark, imposes on the priests the duty of bringing up their children in such a manner as to make them morally and intellectually fit to occupy this hereditary office. They also deduce from the emphatic position of the term “priests,” that it only applies to those of them who are fit to perform their sacerdotal duties, and not to the disqualified priests .

There shall none be defiled for the dead. —Better, He shall not defile himself for a dead person; that is, the priest is not to contract defilement by contact with the body of any dead person. What constitutes defilement is not specified, but, as is often the case, was left to the administrators of the Law to define more minutely. Accordingly, they enacted that not only touching a dead body, but also coming within four cubits of it, entering the house where the corpse lay, entering a burial place, following to the grave, or the manifestation of mourning for the departed, pollutes the priest. This consequently renders him unfit for performing the services of the sanctuary and for engaging in the services for the people.

This they deduced from Numbers 19:11-16. The Egyptian priests were likewise bound to avoid “burials and graves, from impure men and women.” The Romans ordered a bough of a cypress-tree to be stuck at the door of the house in which a dead body was lying, lest a chief priest should unwittingly enter and defile himself.

Among his people —That is, among the tribes or people of Israel, the Jewish community (Deuteronomy 33:3, and so on). Hence, the authorities during the second Temple concluded that when the corpse is among the people whose duty it is to ensure its burial, the priest is forbidden to take part in it. However, if a priest, or even the high priest, finds a human body on the road where he cannot call on anyone to bury it, he is obliged to perform this last sacred office for the dead himself. When one bears in mind how much the ancient Hebrews thought of burial, and that nothing exceeded their horror more than the thought of an unburied corpse of anyone belonging to them, this humane legislation will be duly appreciated.