Or HaChaim on Leviticus 7:20/אור החיים על ויקרא ז׳:כ׳

1 ונפש אשר תאכל בשר וטומאתו עליו, And a person who eats of sacrificial meat….while he is ritually unclean, etc. Both this and the following verse are interpreted by Torat Kohanim as speaking of personal ritual impurity [as opposed to the meat having become impure, as suggested by the masculine pronoun עליו which does not fit the subject נפש which is feminine. Ed.]. Zevachim 43 states that any verse which has not been interpreted by Rabbi Yitzchak son of Avdimi in this fashion cannot be interpreted in this way. Rabbi Yitzchak son of Avdimi had stated that only if a verse commences with a subject which is feminine and concludes with a subject which is feminine and in between we encounter a masculine pronoun may we interpret that the masculine pronoun refers to the original subject and not to the object which is masculine. Rashi explains that seeing that the verse following displays the same pattern and it is clear in that verse that the person who is the subject of the word ואכל, "and he eats," is a human being, verse 20 must be understood in the same sense. Rashi's words help us understand why the word וטומאתו "while he is impure," do not have to refer to the word בשר, which is the only masculine noun in that verse seeing that we thought that the laws about the meat being impure had already been concluded as Rashi explained in his commentary in Zevachim 43 where the verse is examined.

2Torat Kohanim also cites a gezeyrah shavah comparing the word טומאתו, mentioned here with the word טומאתו mentioned in Numbers 19,13. However, I have decided to concentrate on the reason the Torah saw fit to contravene the rules of grammar in our two verses. If the Torah had simply written the word וטומאתה in verse 20 instead of writing וטומאתו, we would not have had to resort to the exegetical use of the gezeyrah shavah in Numbers 19,13 at all. Also, why did the Torah not write verse 21 in a more straighforward manner?

3I believe that when the Torah wrote וטומאתו עליו in verse 20, it wanted to teach us something different altogether. The words refer to someone who had already undergone the purification process of seven days for someone who has become impure through contact with the dead, but had not yet experienced sunset on his seventh day; alternatively, it may refer to a person impure through contact with some kind of four-legged creeping animal who has not yet undergone ritual immersion. It is important to appreciate that such residual impurity as we have just mentioned is not so serious that it affects the soul of the person concerned. It is more like a veil of impurity which envelops only the outside of the body of a person. This is the reason why ritual immersion is sufficient to remove the last vestiges of such impurity although for the previous seven days such a ritual immersion would have been quite ineffective seeing the impurity had penetrated also the inside of the body. When the Torah wrote והנפש אשר תאכל…וטומאתו עליו, it informed us that not only is someone guilty of the Karet penalty when the impurity he is suffering from is עליה, envelops his soul, but even if the impurity has already been reduced to a state where it is only עליו on the outside of his body, the same penalty still applies if he eats sacrificial meat before having become totally pure. Similar considerations apply to someone who has not yet shed the relatively lighter impurity absorbed through his having contacted a dead creeping animal.

4Why then does the Torah use the masculine form ואכל in the middle of verse 21, when the correct term would have been ואכלה seeing that I could not have mistaken its meaning and it would have been so much simpler to have a uniform text in both of these verses? I believe that the reason the Torah chose to write נפש כי תגע, a feminine way of describing the contact instead of writing איש כי יגע the parallel masculine form, is to inform us that such contact with the source of impurity had to be intentional not merely accidental in order for the person to become culpable of the penalty mentioned. The word נפש alludes to such an intentional act. This is also the reason why the Torah chose the word נפש instead of איש in verse 20. The word איש would not have conveyed the fact that the act was committed intentionally. Keeping in mind the thought that the word נפש alludes to the awareness of the sinner of what he is doing will help us understand the recurrent use of the word נפש in chapter four and five which deals with inadvertently committed sins. This word explains the need for the sinner to offer sin-offerings or guilt-offerings in those situations. Had the sinner been totally unaware of committing a wrong the Torah would not have required these offerings from him so that he could atone for his mistakes. We may summarise that the word נפש indicates that the person who committed the trespass cannot claim unawareness of doing something wrong. In our two verses here the word נפש implies that the guilty party was aware of touching something he should not have touched (verse21) or he was aware that he ate something he should not have eaten (verse 20). We cannot therefore question why the Torah used a masculine term in the middle of both verses as there was no need to depart from the norm in describing the perpetrator of the sin as being a male. The reason the Torah wrote ונכרתה הנפש ההיא, "this soul will be exterminated," is to teach us that G'd will not only punish the body of the sinner by premature death or something like it, but that He will also punish his soul by death.

5In addition to the approach of our sages in the Talmud, we may find still another reason to justify the repetition of our verses by referring to the Mishnah in Zevachim 106. We learn there that a person who is ritually impure and eats sacrfificial meat is guilty regardless of whether that meat had already been defiled or not. Rabbi Yossi Haglili disagrees saying that if said meat had already been defiled, the person who ate it is not guilty. In discussing this problem on folio 108, the Talmud concludes that if the person became defiled before the meat became defiled there is a concensus that the person who ate from that meat is guilty. The disagreement between the majority opinion and Rabbi Yossi Haglili concerns only a situation when the meat became defiled before the person eating it became impure. This is why the Torah had to write two verses The first verse i.e. והנפש אשר תאכל describes a situation in which a person who is ritually unclean ate sacrificial meat of a peace-offering which was ritually pure; the second verse which writes ואכל מבשר זבח השלמים, speaks of a ritually impure person who ate sacrificial meat which had already become defiled. Perhaps the reason the Torah described the meat in the first verse as תאכל בשר מזבח שלמים, meat of a peace-offering, is that the meat in question had not yet become defiled; in the following verse the Torah changed this description by writing מבשר זבח שלמים, meaning the meat was of a category which qualifies as a meat-offering, but it had been defiled in the meantime and does no longer qualify for being eaten. It is no longer בשר שלמים. The letter מ in the word מבשר indicates that it is no longer wholly a meat-offering, זבח שלמים. The letter מ is therefore not exegetically available for some other למוד, halachah, to be derived from it.