In the Levitical law (Num. xix. 11-22) every dead body was an unclean thing, including those dead in the tent and on the battlefield. Touching a corpse involved purification and separation for seven days. This ordinance is supposed to have had a sanitary motive, having probably originated with cases of infectious disease. There is only one Biblical ordinance as to early burial, and that is indubitably restricted to persons executed for crime: Deut. xxi. 22, 23, “And if a man have committed a sin worthy of death, and he be put to death, and thou hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but thou shalt in any wise bury him that day (for he that is hanged is accursed of God), that thy land be not defiled which the Lord thy God giveth thee for an inheritance.”This statutory limit to the exposure of the bodies of malefactors was the most convenient way of checking the practice, common in other countries, of leaving corpses of criminals to hang upon the gibbet until they rotted, or were consumed by birds of prey. Its motive was to prevent, by the promptest measure, an indefinite degree of neglect in altogether special cases. There is nothing else in the Bible concerning early burial; on the contrary, the patriarchal practice, in the case of eminent persons, seems to have been to keep the body for a considerable time above ground, after the manner of Egypt. Prior to the Babylonian exile there is not a trace of the later practice of speedy burial. The post-Talmudic custom had arisen entirely from a misunderstanding. It is true that the Talmud enjoins that corpses--according to circumstances--be kept unburied not longer than one day; but it also permits them to lie above ground for days, so that elaborate funeral preparations might be made, or time given for mourners to arrive from a distance. Lastly, the Talmud relates the burial of one apparently dead who revived and lived for twenty-five years, and begat five children; whereupon a rabbinical ordinance was made that the corpse (which would have been laid in a vault or in a tomb above ground) should be visited diligently until three days after death. (The references to the Talmud are: Semachoth 8; Moedkaton 1, 6; Sabbat 151, 152; Sanhedrin 46a.) Wunderbar admits that there had been cases of premature burial among the Jews, but he asserts their extreme rarity, and doubts the authenticity of most of the traditional or historical cases in general.