Anyone who came into contact with a human corpse, or grave, was so ritually impure that they had to be sprinkled with the water produced from the red heifer ritual, in order to become ritually pure again;[11] however, the person who carried out the red heifer ritual and who sprinkled the water, was to be treated as having become ritually impure by doing so.[12] According to biblical scholars, this ritual derives from the same origin as the ritual described in Deuteronomy for a group of people to atone for murder by an unknown perpetrator,[13] according to which a heifer is killed at a stream, and hands are washed over it;[14] biblical scholars believe that these are both ultimately cases of sympathetic magic,[9] and similar rituals existed in Greek[15] and Roman[16] mythology.[17] The masoretic text describes the water produced from the red heifer ritual as a sin offering;[18] some English translations discount this detail, because it differs from other sin offerings by not being killed at the altar, although biblical scholars believe that this demonstrates a failure by these translations to understand the meaning of sin offerings.[9]