1And the LORD spoke to Moses and to Aaron, saying, 2“Should a person have on the skin of his body an inflammation or a rash or a shiny spot and it become the affliction of skin blanch on the skin of his body, he shall be brought to Aaron the priest or to one of his sons the priests. 3And the priest shall see the affliction on the skin of the body, and if the hair in the affliction has turned white and the affliction seems deeper than the skin of his body, it is skin blanch. When the priest sees it, he shall declare him unclean. 4And if it is a white shiny spot on the skin of his body and it does not seem deeper than the skin, and its hair has not turned white, the priest shall confine the person with the affliction seven days. 5And the priest shall see him on the seventh day, and, look, if the affliction has held its color, if the affliction has not spread in the skin, the priest shall confine him another seven days. 6And the priest shall see him again on the seventh day, and, look, if the affliction has faded, if the affliction has not spread on the skin, the priest shall declare him clean. It is a rash. And he shall launder his clothes and be clean. 7But if the rash in fact has spread in the skin after he has been seen by the priest and has been declared clean, he shall be seen again by the priest. 8And if the priest sees and, look, the rash has spread in the skin, the priest shall declare him unclean. It is skin blanch. 9Should a person have the affliction of skin blanch, he shall be brought to the priest. 10And if the priest sees, and, look, there is a white inflammation in the skin in which the hair has turned white and there is exposed flesh in the inflammation, 11it is chronic skin blanch in the skin of his body, and the priest shall declare him unclean. He shall not confine him, for he is unclean. 12And if the skin blanch in fact erupts in the skin, and the skin blanch covers all the skin of the person with the affliction from head to toe, wherever the priest’s eyes can see, 13the priest shall see and, look, if the skin blanch has covered his whole body, he shall declare the affliction clean. It has turned white; it is clean. 14On the day exposed flesh is seen in it, he shall be unclean. 15When the priest sees the exposed flesh, he shall declare him unclean. The exposed flesh is unclean; it is skin blanch. 16Or, should the exposed flesh recede and turn white, he shall come to the priest, 17and the priest shall see him, and, look, if the affliction has turned white, the priest shall declare the person with the affliction clean. He is clean. 18And a body in which there be burning rash on the skin that is healed, 19and there be in the place of the burning rash a white inflammation or a reddish white shiny spot, 20and it be seen by the priest, and the priest see, and, look, if it appears lower than the skin and its hair has turned white, the priest shall declare him unclean. It is the affliction of skin blanch. It has erupted in the burning rash. 21And if the priest sees it and, look, there is no white hair in it and it is not lower than the skin and it is faded, the priest shall confine him seven days. 22And if in fact it has spread in the skin, the priest shall confine him. It is an affliction. 23And if the shiny spot remains in its place, does not spread, it is the scar of the burning rash, and the priest shall declare him clean. 24Or, should there be a burn from fire in the skin of a body, and the exposed flesh of the burn be a reddish white or white shiny spot, 25the priest shall see it and, look, if the hair has turned white in the shiny spot and seems deeper than the skin, it is skin blanch, it has erupted in the burn, and the priest shall declare him unclean. It is the affliction of skin blanch. 26And if the priest sees him and, look, there is no white hair in the shiny spot and it is not lower than the skin and it is faded, the priest shall confine him seven days. 27And when the priest sees him on the seventh day, if in fact it has spread in the skin, the priest shall declare him unclean. It is the affliction of skin blanch. 28And if the shiny spot remains in its place, does not spread in the skin, and it is faded, it is the inflammation of the burn, and the priest shall declare him clean, for it is the scar of the burn. 29And should a man or a woman have an affliction in head or beard, 30and the priest see the affliction and, look, it seems deeper than the skin and there is thin yellow hair in it, the priest shall declare him unclean. It is scurf. It is blanch disease of the head or of the beard. 31And should the priest see the affliction and, look, it does not seem deeper than the skin but it has no black hair, the priest shall confine the person with the affliction of scurf another seven days. 32And the priest shall see the affliction on the seventh day and, look, if the scurf has not spread and there is no yellow hair in it and the scurf seems deeper than the skin, 33the person with the scurf shall shave himself but the scurf he shall not shave, and the priest shall confine the person with the scurf another seven days. 34And the priest shall see the scurf on the seventh day and, look, if the scurf has not spread in the skin and there is no yellow hair in it and it does not seem deeper than the skin, the priest shall declare him clean, and he shall launder his clothes and be clean. 35And if the scurf has in fact spread in the skin after his being declared clean, 36and the priest sees it and, look, the scurf has spread in the skin, the priest shall not examine for the yellow hair—he is unclean. 37And if the scurf has held its color and black hair has grown in it, the scurf is healed, he is clean, and the priest shall declare him clean. 38And should a man or a woman have on the skin of their body multiple white shiny spots, 39and the priest sees and, look, on the skin of their body there are multiple dull white spots, it is tetter. It has erupted in the skin. He is clean. 40And should a man’s hair fall out, he is bald on the pate. He is clean. 41And if the front part of his hair falls out, he is bald on the forehead. He is clean. 42And should there be on the bald pate or on the bald forehead a white affliction, it is erupting skin blanch on his bald pate or on his bald forehead. 43And the priest shall see him and, look, the inflammation of the affliction is reddish white on his bald pate or on his bald forehead, like skin blanch of the body in appearance, 44he is afflicted with skin blanch. He is unclean. The priest shall surely declare him unclean. His affliction is on his head. 45And the person afflicted with skin blanch, in whom the affliction is, his clothes shall be torn and his hair disheveled, and his moustache he shall cover, and he shall call out, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ 46All the days that the affliction is on him he shall remain unclean. He is unclean. He shall dwell apart. Outside the camp shall his dwelling place be.
47“And should a garment have in it a scaly affliction, whether in a wool garment or a linen garment, 48whether in the warp or in the woof of the linen or the wool, or in a skin or anything made of skin, 49and the affliction be greenish or reddish in the garment or in the skin or in the warp or in the woof or in any article of skin, it is the scaly affliction, and it shall be shown to the priest. 50And the priest shall see the affliction and sequester the article with the affliction seven days. 51And if he sees the affliction on the seventh day, that the affliction has spread through the garment or through the warp or through the woof or through the skin for anything that the skin may serve for a task, the affliction is malignant scale disease. It is unclean. 52And the garment or the warp or the woof in wool or in linen or in any article of skin in which the affliction is shall be burned, for it is malignant scale disease. It shall be burned in fire. 53And if the priest sees and, look, the affliction has not spread through the garment or through the warp or through the woof or through any article of skin, 54the priest shall charge, and they shall launder that in which the affliction was and sequester it another seven days. 55And the priest shall see after the article with the affliction has been laundered, and, look, if the affliction has not changed color and the affliction has not spread, it is unclean. In fire you shall burn it. It is corrosion, whether on its inner side or its outer side. 56And if the priest sees, and, look, the affliction has become faded after being laundered, he shall tear it from the garment or from the skin or from the warp or from the woof. 57And if it shall still appear in the garment or in the warp or in the woof or in any article of skin, it is eruptive. In fire you shall burn it—that in which the affliction is. 58And the garment or the warp or the woof or any article of skin that you launder and from which the affliction disappears shall be laundered again and be clean. 59This is the teaching about the scaly affliction of a wool or linen garment or warp or woof or any article of skin, to declare it clean or unclean.”
CHAPTER 13 NOTES
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2. on the skin of his body. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “on the skin of his flesh.” Though that sounds close to a redundancy in English, the point, as Rashbam proposed, is probably to distinguish bare skin from the areas where the skin is covered by hair.
inflammation . . . rash . . . shiny spot. Throughout this long section on dermatological disorders, the precise identification of disease and even symptom remains uncertain, and the approximations afforded by translation are chiefly guided by etymology. (“Inflammation,” for example, represents the Hebrew seʾet, which appears to exhibit the verbal root that means “to raise”; “shiny spot” is proposed for baheret because the verbal stem on which that noun is formed means “to shine” or “to be bright.”) The fact of the matter is that the ancients perceived and described diseases and their symptoms differently than does modern Western medicine, and some conditions that they understood to be a single malady may actually have been a variety of diseases, not all of them intrinsically related. Scholarly attempts to equate the various conditions reported here with specific dermatological disorders have had only limited success. A certain lack of specificity in the translation of the quasimedical language of this section seems prudent and, indeed, appropriate.
3. the priest shall see the affliction. In most of its recurrences here, the verb “see” has the obvious force of “examine,” but this is still another instance in which an ordinary all-purpose term is enlisted for a technical use—a stylistic practice this translation emulates.
skin blanch. Although older English translations represent the Hebrew tsaraʿat (etymol ogy uncertain) as “leprosy,” modern scholars are virtually unanimous in rejecting this identification. The symptoms do not correspond, and there is scant evidence that leprosy was present in the Near East before the Hellenistic period. No positive identification with a disease known to modern medicine has been made. In most biblical occurrences, tsaraʿat is associated with a ghastly white loss of pigmentation, and hence this translation adopts the coined term “skin blanch” (see the comment on Exodus 4:6). Loss of pigmentation in hair and skin is prominent here as a determining symptom.
When the priest sees it, he shall declare him unclean. The examining priest determines the diagnosis, and perhaps one should think of him as performing at least one function of a physician. But these regulations for skin conditions reflect an ambiguous conception of disease that wavers between pathology and ritual impurity (the general sense of tamʾe, “unclean”). Thus the quarantining of the afflicted person might involve a fear of contagion in the medical sense or might be chiefly an avoidance of ritual contamination, and one suspects that the two were blurred in the Israelite imagination. Jacob Milgrom proposes that the wasting of the flesh involved in tsaraʿat is associated with death, and that these laws are an expression of the impulse in Leviticus to separate all deathlike phenomena from the living.
11. chronic skin blanch. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “old skin blanch,” with the implication of its persistence—hence “chronic.”
12. the person with the affliction. The Hebrew, as repeatedly elsewhere in this passage, simply says “the affliction,” but this is an obvious ellipsis or, as some prefer to call it, a metonymy.
from head to toe. The literal Hebrew idiom is “from his head to his feet.”
13. It has turned white; it is clean. The referent of the second clause might be either the affliction (negaʿ) or the person, in which case it should be translated “he is clean.” This criterion for being cured is a little confusing because white has been associated with the disease—compare the preceding clause, “the skin blanch has covered his whole body.” Here, however, as Baruch Levine explains, the whiteness is an indication of fresh skin that has grown instead of “exposed flesh” (as in the next verse).
17. the priest shall declare the person with the affliction clean. He is clean. This seeming redundancy probably reflects the attention to procedure of the law: first we have the instructions about what the attending priest must do, then a replication of the official, diagnostic declaration the priest is to make: “He is clean.”
24. burn from fire. The introduction of actual burns here reflects how little these regulations correspond to modern conceptions of disease. The previous verse had dealt with “burning rash” (others: “boils”), sheḥin, a skin disease which by etymology suggests heat or burning. This leads the Levitical legislator associatively to consider burns, which in his view have the potential to turn into tsaraʿat (perhaps how he perceives an infected burn).
29. a man or a woman . . . head or beard. “Head” of course refers to either and “beard” to the man alone.
30. thin yellow hair. This seems to indicate a loss of hair pigmentation that gives the hair a flat discolored look without turning it altogether white. Black hair was normative among ancient Israelites; Esau and David were said to have red hair, but there is no indication of blonds in the population.
33. shave himself. As Levine notes, the purpose of shaving all around the affected area would be to allow the priest to examine it more readily.
39. tetter. This all-purpose term for skin diseases (herpes, impetigo, eczema), adopted by many English translators, seems appropriate for the indeterminate Hebrew bohaq, indicating a dermatological condition that for some reason was not thought to impart uncleanness.
40. he is bald. As with the earlier association of burning rash and burns with infectious diseases, the law here goes against the grain of modern understanding by placing a hereditary condition such as baldness in the category of potentially contaminating skin diseases. Carefully taxonomic according to its own lights, the law distinguishes between baldness fore and aft.
45. his moustache he shall cover. This rather odd expression seems to indicate that the afflicted person is to pull some sort of scarf or head covering around his mouth—according to Abraham ibn Ezra, so that he will bring no harm to others from his contaminating breath. The law may stipulate moustache rather than mouth to mark the line up to which the covering is to be pulled. The tearing of the garment and the disheveled hair are ordinarily signs of mourning, but here their evident function is to set aside the afflicted person from the healthy, like the bell that was rung by lepers in medieval times, and like the cry of “Unclean! Unclean!” at the end of this verse.
46. he shall remain unclean. He is unclean. See the comment on verse 17.
47. a scaly affliction. The Hebrew is nega‘ tsara‘at. Here the disparity between ancient understanding and modern categories is most striking. This is the same term for the condition that, when it appears on a human body, has been rendered here as “skin blanch.” That translation obviously does not work for fabrics and leather, and the law seems to have in mind some sort of mold or mildew, which, however, is thought to exhibit the same pathology as the dermatological condition, perhaps because of a sickly whiteness manifested in both.
48. whether in the warp or in the woof. Milgrom, who has actually consulted weavers, notes that two kinds of threads of different textures and thicknesses are often used, a fact that makes it possible for certain forms of decay to spread through one set of threads and not the other.
50. sequester. The Hebrew verb is the same one used for “confining” an afflicted person, but strict English usage does not permit “confining” objects.
55. has not changed color and . . . has not spread. The crucial criterion is the color. Even if the blight has not spread, it is regarded as unclean because the color has not changed.
corrosion. The Hebrew peḥetet has not been identified but etymologically it is associated with either a term that means “diminution” or one that means “pit.”
59. This is the teaching about the scaly affliction of a wool or linen garment. This verse formally marks the conclusion of the passage dealing with tsaraʿat in fabrics and leather. The chapter that follows will return to people afflicted with the disease.