1And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, 2“This shall be the teaching concerning the one struck with skin blanch on the day he becomes clean. He shall be brought to the priest, 3and the priest shall go outside the camp, and the priest shall see, and, look, if the affliction of skin blanch is healed in the afflicted one, 4the priest shall charge that there be taken for him who is cleansing himself two live pure birds and cedar wood and crimson stuff and hyssop. 5And the priest shall charge that one bird be slaughtered in an earthen vessel over fresh water. 6The living bird—he shall take it, and the cedar wood and the crimson stuff and the hyssop, and dip them and the living bird in the blood of the slaughtered bird over fresh water. 7And he shall sprinkle upon him who is cleansing himself of the skin blanch seven times, and cleanse him, and he shall send out the living bird over the open field. 8And he who is cleansing himself shall launder his garments and shave his hair and wash in water and be clean. And afterward he shall come into the camp and sit outside his tent seven days. 9And it shall be, on the seventh day, he shall shave all the hair of his head and his beard and his eyebrows, and all his hair he shall shave, and he shall launder his garments and wash his flesh in water, and become clean. 10And on the eighth day he shall take two unblemished sheep and one unblemished yearling ewe and three-tenths of semolina flour, a grain offering mixed with oil, and one log of oil. 11And the cleansing priest shall set the man cleansing himself, together with them, before the LORD at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting. 12And the priest shall take the one sheep and bring it forward as a guilt offering, and the log of oil, and he shall elevate them as an elevation offering before the LORD. 13And he shall slaughter the sheep in the place where the offense offering is slaughtered, and the burnt offering in the place of the sacred zone, for offense offering and guilt offering alike are the priest’s. It is holy of holies. 14And the priest shall take from the blood of the guilt offering and the priest shall put it on the right earlobe of him who is cleansing himself and on the thumb of his right hand and on the big toe of his right foot. 15And the priest shall take from the log of oil and pour it into the left palm of the priest. 16And the priest shall dip his right finger into the oil that is in his palm and sprinkle from the oil with his finger seven times before the LORD. 17And from the rest of the oil that is in his palm the priest shall put on the right earlobe of the one who is cleansing himself and on the thumb of his right hand and on the big toe of his right foot, together with the blood of the guilt offering. 18And what remains of the oil that is in the palm of the priest he shall put on the head of the one who is cleansing himself, and the priest shall atone for him before the LORD. 19And the priest shall do the offense offering and atone for the one cleansing himself from his uncleanness, and afterward he shall slaughter the burnt offering. 20And the priest shall offer up the burnt offering and the grain offering on the altar, and the priest shall atone for him, and he shall be clean. 21And if he is poor and his hand cannot attain, he shall take one sheep as guilt offering for an elevation offering to atone for himself, and one-tenth of semolina flour mixed with oil as a grain offering, and a log of oil, 22and two turtledoves or two young pigeons, as his hand may attain, and one shall be an offense offering and one a burnt offering. 23And he shall bring them on the eighth day of his cleansing to the priest at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting before the LORD. 24And the priest shall take the sheep of the guilt offering and the log of oil, and the priest shall elevate them as an elevation offering before the LORD. 25And he shall slaughter the sheep of the guilt offering, and the priest shall take from the blood of the guilt offering and put it on the right earlobe of the one who is cleansing himself and on the thumb of his right hand and on the big toe of his right foot. 26And from the oil the priest shall pour into the left palm of the priest. 27And the priest shall sprinkle with his right finger from the oil that is in his left palm seven times before the LORD. 28And the priest shall put from the oil that is in his palm on the right earlobe of the one who is cleansing himself and on the thumb of his right hand and on the big toe of his right foot, on the place of the blood of the guilt offering. 29And what remains of the oil that is in the palm of the priest he shall put on the head of the one who is cleansing himself to atone for him before the LORD. 30And he shall do one of the turtledoves or of the young pigeons, from which his hand attains, that which his hand attains, 31the one for an offense offering and the other for a burnt offering, together with the grain offering. And the priest shall atone for the one who is cleansing himself before the LORD. 32This is the teaching concerning him in whom there is an affliction of skin blanch whose hand cannot attain, when he is being cleansed.”
33And the LORD spoke to Moses and to Aaron, saying, 34“When you come into the land of Canaan which I am about to give you as a holding, and I put the scaly affliction in the house of the land of your holding, 35he whose house it is shall come and tell the priest, saying, ‘Something like an affliction has appeared to me in the house.’ 36And the priest shall charge that they clear the house so that nothing in the house is unclean before the priest comes to see the affliction, and afterward the priest shall come to see the house. 37And if he sees the affliction and, look, the affliction is in the walls of the house, greenish or reddish hollows that seem lower than the wall, 38the priest shall go out of the house to the entrance of the house and sequester the house seven days. 39And the priest shall come back on the seventh day and see and, look, if the affliction has spread in the walls of the house, 40the priest shall charge that they pull out the stones in which the affliction is and fling them outside the town into an unclean place. 41And the house shall be scraped from within all around, and they shall spill the earth that they scraped off outside the town into an unclean place. 42And they shall take different stones and bring them in place of the stones, and different earth shall be taken and the house plastered. 43And if the affliction comes back and erupts in the house after the pulling out of the stones and after the scraping of the house and after the plastering, 44the priest shall come and see and, look, if the affliction has spread, it is malignant scale disease in the house. It is unclean. 45And he shall raze the house, its stones, and its timbers and all the earth of the house, and he shall have it taken out beyond the town to an unclean place. 46And whoever comes into the house all the days it is sequestered shall be unclean until evening. 47And whoever lies in the house shall launder his garments, and whoever eats in the house shall launder his garments. 48And if the priest in fact comes and sees and, look, the affliction has not spread in the house after the plastering of the house, the priest shall declare the house clean, for the affliction has been healed. 49And he shall take to purge the house two birds and cedar wood and scarlet stuff and hyssop. 50And he shall slaughter the one bird into an earthen vessel over fresh water. 51And he shall take the cedar wood and the hyssop and the scarlet stuff and the living bird and dip them in the blood of the slaughtered bird and in the fresh water and sprinkle on the house seven times. 52And he shall purge the house with the blood of the bird and with the fresh water and with the living bird and with the cedar wood and with the hyssop and with the scarlet stuff. 53And he shall send out the living bird beyond the town to the open field and atone for the house, and it shall be clean. 54This is the teaching for every affliction of skin blanch and for scurf, 55and for scale disease of garment and of house, 56and for inflammation and for scab and for shiny spot, 57to teach on the day of the unclean and on the day of the clean—this is the teaching concerning scale disease.”
CHAPTER 14 NOTES
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2. on the day. This expression often has the sense of “when,” and it occurs twice at the very end of the chapter, enclosing the entire unit in an envelope structure. The phrase might, however, specifically indicate the actual day of the purification rite, as some of the early rabbis contended. What follows is a set of procedures to be performed on that day.
3. shall see. As in the preceding chapter, the sense is “examine” or “inspect.”
4. that there be taken. Here and repeatedly elsewhere in this chapter, the Hebrew third-person singular active verb without a specified subject is used as an equivalent of the passive.
cedar wood and crimson stuff. Jacob Milgrom proposes that both are used in this rite of purification because of their red color, linked with blood, which also functions here as a purifying agent. Hyssop appears elsewhere in biblical literature as an instrument of purification, although it remains uncertain why it was thought to have that efficacy.
5. fresh water. The literal meaning of the Hebrew is “living water,” which creates a link with the “live” bird. The sense of the idiom is flowing water, whether from a spring or a river. Since the entire ritual is designed to carry off the impurities from the place inhabited by the community, one may infer that the fresh water is to carry off the overflow of the blood.
6. The living bird—he shall take it. The Hebrew syntax, reproduced in this translation, is a little odd because the accusative “it” is redundant after “The living bird” has already appeared as the object of the verb. The evident intention is to highlight the living bird in contrast to the slaughtered bird.
7. he shall send out the living bird over the open field. This rite of releasing the bird in open country suggests an obvious analogy with the ritual of the scapegoat. The living bird, having been dipped in the blood of the slaughtered bird that has also been sprinkled on the person to be cleansed, carries off any residual impurities to a place far from human habitation. There is something clearly archaic about this entire ritual, and scholarship has detected antecedents in Mesopotamian rites of magical purgation.
9. he shall shave all the hair of his head and his beard and his eyebrows, and all his hair. The last seemingly redundant phrase probably indicates that he is to shave all his body hair—the chest, the legs, and the pubic area. Such total removal of hair was otherwise abhorrent in ancient Israel, but in this instance it is enjoined as an expression of the encompassing thoroughness of the cleansing process.
10. three-tenths of semolina flour. The ellipsis is for three-tenths of an ephah, a dry measure roughly equivalent to 19 liters. A log is about 1¼ cups.
12. guilt offering. It may sound puzzling that a person who has suffered from a skin disease is thought to have incurred guilt. It may be that the ancients imagined this particular disease as a punishment for some transgressive act, as when Miriam is stricken with skin blanch for slandering her brother (Numbers 12:10–15).
14. earlobe . . . thumb . . . big toe. The ritual works by synecdoche: from the protrusion of the head of the earlobe to the protrusions of hand and foot (all on the “governing” right side), the person being cleansed is symbolically covered with the blood of the guilt offering from head to toe without actually immersing in it.
17. from the rest of the oil . . . the priest shall put on the right earlobe. The two purgative substances dominating the rite are blood and oil (to which one may add the fresh water of the preceding ritual of the two birds). Blood belongs to the animal kingdom, oil (olive oil) to the vegetable kingdom. Blood, as the life substance, has purgative force; oil, elsewhere used for anointing the sacralia, has both consecrating and purgative power. Here, both the blood and the oil are part of the sacrifice.
21. And if he is poor. As with other kinds of sacrifice, special provision for a less costly offering is made for the person of limited means whose “hand cannot attain” (or “reach out,” “manage”) to bring the stipulated sacrifice.
26. the priest shall pour into the left palm of the priest. This odd wording led some traditional commentators to conclude that two priests are involved in the ritual, but perhaps the noun is repeated simply to make clear that the oil is not poured into the palm of the person cleansing himself.
27. his right finger. The rabbis plausibly inferred this was the index finger.
34. I put the scaly affliction. The Hebrew verb used here is identical with the one just employed for God’s “giving” the land. A theological notion is adumbrated in the pun: God bestows (verbal stem n-t-n) both great bounty and also blight. The Midrash in Leviticus Rabba, seeking to rescue divine benevolence for Israel, fancifully imagines that the Canaanites have hidden gold in the walls of their houses which is discovered when the stones are pulled apart in the ritual of purgation.
35. Something like an affliction has appeared to me in the house. The vagueness of the phrasing reflects the uncertainty of the home owner’s diagnosis. We have already observed the peculiar extrapolation from scaly skin disease to blight or mildew in fabrics. Now the owner of the house contemplates what is evidently some sort of mold or mildew in the walls of his house and wonders whether it exhibits a certain similarity—which the diagnosing priest could establish as actually the very same pathology—to the skin disease called tsaraʿat.
40. fling them outside the town into an unclean place. As the emphatic language suggests, what is involved is not a neutral act of removing contaminants but a ridding the community of noxious impurities that are to be consigned, with vehement energy, to a place of impurity outside the pale of the community.
51. And he shall take . . . and dip them in the blood . . . and sprinkle on the house seven times. These linked rituals of purgation, from person to house, are motivated not medically but by a pervasive sense that the human community is constantly threatened by forces of impurity which must be warded off or, should they invade, which must be utterly purged through all the ritual gestures and detergent substances at the disposal of the priestly class. The shadowy antecedents of this vision of impurity lie in a pagan sense of a realm of contamination dominated by demonic spirits. Although the ritual apparatus, no doubt drawing on archaic precedents, remains in place, there is no indication here that impurity is associated with the demonic, though there appears to be an association with decay, deformity, and death.
54. This is the teaching for every affliction of skin blanch. The little catalogue that begins here and continues through the next two verses serves as a summary, enfolding the laws of this chapter with the preceding one (where scurf, scale disease of garment, and inflammation, scab, and shiny spot are all mentioned).
57. on the day of the unclean and on the day of the clean. Less literally, and adopting a minor shift in the vowel points proposed by Baruch Levine, this could mean: when they are cleansed and when they are unclean.