And you shall give her to Eleazar the priest: The Hebrew pronoun for you is plural, referring to Moses and Aaron, to whom the LORD is still speaking. Good News Translation refers to them in the third person with the pronoun “they,” since the Israelites are the addressees here in Good News Translation (see the comments on the previous verse). The book of Numbers introduces Eleazar the priest at 3.2-4. The job of organizing and supervising this ritual of purification passes from Moses and Aaron to Eleazar, Aaron’s son, and the other priests in general (verses 6-7), since it was to be “a perpetual statute” (verse 10).

And she shall be taken outside the camp and slaughtered before him is literally “and someone shall take her outside the camp and slaughter her before him,” that is, someone must kill the cow under the supervision of Eleazar. This type of impersonal verbal construction where the subject is not specified may be natural in some languages. It is clear from the phrase before him as well as from the verses that follow that Eleazar does not slaughter the cow himself. As Rashi and Rashbam noted, this is done by another person, so the footnote in Good News Translation is not a credible alternative. The cow had to be killed outside the camp since the impurity transferred to it would have made the Israelite camp ritually unclean. There is no basis in the Hebrew for the rendering this phrase as “to the east of the camp” in Good News Translation‘s footnote (see verse 4).

Quoted with permission from de Regt, Lénart J. and Wendland, Ernst R. A Handbook on Numbers. (UBS Helps for Translators). Miami: UBS, 2016. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .