16 Bible Verses about Rules About Corpses

If a homicide victim should be found lying in a field in the land the Lord your God is giving you, and no one knows who killed him, your elders and judges must go out and measure how far it is to the cities in the vicinity of the corpse. Then the elders of the city nearest to the corpse must take from the herd a heifer that has not been worked -- that has never pulled with the yoke -- read more.
and bring the heifer down to a wadi with flowing water, to a valley that is neither plowed nor sown. There at the wadi they are to break the heifer's neck. Then the Levitical priests will approach (for the Lord your God has chosen them to serve him and to pronounce blessings in his name, and to decide every judicial verdict) and all the elders of that city nearest the corpse must wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken in the valley. Then they must proclaim, "Our hands have not spilled this blood, nor have we witnessed the crime. Do not blame your people Israel whom you redeemed, O Lord, and do not hold them accountable for the bloodshed of an innocent person." Then atonement will be made for the bloodshed. In this manner you will purge out the guilt of innocent blood from among you, for you must do what is right before the Lord.

"'This is the law: When a man dies in a tent, anyone who comes into the tent and all who are in the tent will be ceremonially unclean seven days. And every open container that has no covering fastened on it is unclean.

No man from the descendants of Aaron who is diseased or has a discharge may eat the holy offerings until he becomes clean. The one who touches anything made unclean by contact with a dead person, or a man who has a seminal emission,

"'Whoever touches the corpse of any person will be ceremonially unclean seven days.

And whoever touches the body of someone killed with a sword in the open fields, or the body of someone who died of natural causes, or a human bone, or a grave, will be unclean seven days.

Or when there is a person who touches anything ceremonially unclean, whether the carcass of an unclean wild animal, or the carcass of an unclean domesticated animal, or the carcass of an unclean creeping thing, even if he did not realize it, but he himself has become unclean and is guilty;

"'Now if an animal that you may eat dies, whoever touches its carcass will be unclean until the evening.

The Lord said to Moses: "Say to the priests, the sons of Aaron -- say to them, 'For a dead person no priest is to defile himself among his people, except for his close relative who is near to him: his mother, his father, his son, his daughter, his brother, and his virgin sister who is near to him, who has no husband; he may defile himself for her.

"'They must not come near a dead person or they will be defiled; however, for father, mother, son, daughter, brother or sister, they may defile themselves.

He must not go where there is any dead person; he must not defile himself even for his father and his mother.

"'All the days that he separates himself to the Lord he must not contact a dead body.

It happened that some men who were ceremonially defiled by the dead body of a man could not keep the Passover on that day, so they came before Moses and before Aaron on that day.

And those men said to him, "We are ceremonially defiled by the dead body of a man; why are we kept back from offering the Lord's offering at its appointed time among the Israelites?"

"Tell the Israelites, 'If any of you or of your posterity become ceremonially defiled by touching a dead body, or are on a journey far away, then he may observe the Passover to the Lord.

He said to me: "Son of man, this is the place of my throne and the place for the soles of my feet, where I will live among the people of Israel forever. The house of Israel will no longer profane my holy name, neither they nor their kings, by their spiritual prostitution or by the pillars of their kings set up when they die.

Then, because it was the day of preparation, so that the bodies should not stay on the crosses on the Sabbath (for that Sabbath was an especially important one), the Jewish leaders asked Pilate to have the victims' legs broken and the bodies taken down.