Leviticus 13:11

Summary

The verse describes a skin disease identified as tzara'at ("a serious skin disease", H6883) that has become chronic — noshenet ("grown old", H3462) — on a person's flesh. Because the condition is already established, the priest declares the person unclean but does not need to isolate them, since their impure status is already certain.

Key words

• tzara'at ("a serious skin disease", H6883) — feminine singular noun naming the skin condition under examination; functions as the subject of the clause.
• noshenet ("grown old", H3462) — niphal participle, feminine singular, describing the disease as being in a state of chronicity; the niphal stem here conveys the condition's own persistence rather than an action done to it by someone else.
• time' ("he will declare unclean", H2930A) — piel sequential perfect, third masculine singular; the piel stem gives an intensive/declarative force, meaning the priest performs a formal pronouncement of uncleanness rather than simply observing it.
• yasgirennu ("he will shut up", H5462) — hiphil imperfect with pronominal suffix "him"; the hiphil (causative) stem indicates the priest causing confinement, and the imperfect marks this as an action that, in this verse, is explicitly negated.
• tame' ("unclean", H2931) — adjective, masculine singular, stating the person's resulting status as the grammatical predicate explaining why no confinement occurs.

What the text says

The clause opens by naming the diagnosis: tzara'at noshenet hi' — "it is a tzara'at [that has] grown old" — using the participle noshenet (H3462) to mark the disease as already in a settled, chronic state rather than newly appearing. The phrase be'or besaro ("in the skin of his flesh") locates it, using two construct nouns, 'or (H5785) and basar (H1320), joined by a possessive suffix.

The narrative continues with the sequential vav on time'o (H2930A), a piel perfect functioning as the next event in sequence: the priest performs the act of declaring the person unclean. This is followed by lo' yasgirennu — a negated hiphil imperfect of sagar (H5462) — stating that the priest will not confine or isolate the person, in contrast to procedures elsewhere in the chapter where confinement is used for uncertain cases. The final clause, ki tame' hu' ("for he is unclean"), gives the reason with the adjective tame' (H2931): since the chronic nature of the disease already establishes the diagnosis, there is no need for the observation period that confinement would otherwise provide.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders yasgirennu ("he will shut up", H5462) with ἀφοριεῖ ("he will separate/set apart"), a term emphasizing separation rather than the Hebrew's more specific sense of physical shutting up or confinement. The Vulgate's non recludet ("he will not shut in") stays closer to the Hebrew's confinement imagery. The Vulgate also renders the final clause as perspicuae immunditiae est ("it is of evident uncleanness"), making explicit an idea of visibility/certainty that is implicit but not stated with a separate word in the Hebrew ki tame' hu' ("for he is unclean").