Or HaChaim on Numbers 19:14/אור החיים על במדבר י״ט:י״ד

1 זאת התורה אדם כי ימות באהל, "This is the Torah (law), when a person dies inside a tent, etc." The words זאת התורה in this verse can be explained along the same lines as I have explained the words זאת חקת התורה in verse 2. This is because the Torah commences this verse with the word אדם. Our sages in Baba Metzia 114 have taught us that the description אדם applies only to Jews. The Torah therefore teaches here that only the bodies of dead Jews are capable of conferring ritual impurity on people who are under the same roof; bodies of dead Gentiles are not able to have that effect on anyone under the same roof with them. The Torah wrote זאת התורה in order to provide the background to this halachah. Only people who have been given the Torah have absorbed the kind of sanctity during their lifetime which attracts the spiritually negative influences to their remains in swarms.

2כל הבא אל האהל וכל אשר באהל, "everyone who comes into that tent and everything which is already inside the tent, etc." The difficulty in this verse is that if a ritually impure person entered the tent containing the dead body of a Jew and becomes defiled thereby why does the Torah have to tell us that the artifacts or another Jew already inside the tent become defiled by their presence in that tent? I have found the following line in Pessikta Zutratey. "The words כל הבא אל האהל mean that he entered only with part of his body." Accordingly, we may conclude that if the Torah had written only כל הבא אל האהל, I would have assumed that such a person contracts impurity only if his entire body enters the tent. How would I have known that he becomes ritually defiled even if only part of his body entered the tent? To teach us this the Torah also wrote כל אשר באהל. Seeing that the Torah had already told us that if one enters the tent with one's whole body one becomes ritually defiled, the words כל אשר באהל must refer to people who entered the tent with only part of their body. I have also found the following in that same paragraph of the Pessikta Zutratey: "An alternative meaning of these words could be that the words כל הבא אל האהל teach us that for halachic purposes we treat the floor of the tent the same as its airspace down to the bowels of the earth." It would appear that the authors were forced to come up with this interpretation because according to the reasoning employed in the first explanation the Torah should have written the two statements in the reverse order, i.e כל אשר באהל followed by כל הבא אל האהל. In that event I could have applied the principle of לא זו אף זו, that the Torah did not only teach me one lesson but also a second lesson. The first lesson would have referred to the entire body entering, the second lesson that even if only part of the body enters that tent the body still becomes ritually unclean. The fact that the Torah first wrote the words כל הבא tells us that the words כל אשר introduce a new halachah altogether.

3However, in the Sifri on our verse I have seen both explanations, the first one attributed to the editor, and the second one attributed to Rabbi Acha bar Yoshiyah. The editor concludes by saying that the reason the Torah had to write the words כל אשר באהל although it had already written כל הבא אל האהל is to include someone who enters the tent only partially. The reason this had to be spelled out is that one cannot impose a penalty on anyone merely by applying logic but that this has to be spelled out in the Torah. I do not understand this comment at all; it is our tradition that this principle applies only to sins involving the death penalty by execution of a human tribunal. In this instance, even if the person in question entered the Sanctuary in a state of ritual impurity, he would be guilty only of death at the hands of heaven. Furthermore, the whole principle of אין עונשין מין הדין is not relevant here at all since the punishment had already been spelled out. Once we have established that a person is culpable for defiling part of his body, there is no need to inform us that he will be culpable if he defiles his whole body seeing that every part of his body is part of the whole body. The culpability for the former has been spelled out in our verse and has not been derived through mere logic.