Leviticus 13:14

Summary

The verse states that on the day living flesh appears in the skin-affected person, that person becomes unclean. It functions as a diagnostic marker within the priestly protocol for skin conditions (tzaraat), where the reappearance of raw or living flesh signals a shift in ritual status.

Key words

• yom ("day", H3117G) — construct noun forming a temporal phrase with the following infinitive, literally "day of its appearing."
• hera'ot ("appears", H7200G) — niphal infinitive of the root meaning "to see/appear"; the niphal stem marks the flesh as the entity being seen (passive-reflexive), not an agent that sees.
• bo ("in him", H9033) — pronominal suffix attached to the preposition, anchoring the appearing to the affected person's body.
• basar chai ("living flesh", H1320 + H2416A) — noun-adjective pair; chai ("living") qualifies basar ("flesh") as raw, uncovered, or exposed tissue rather than skin marked by the disease.
• yitma ("he will be unclean", H2930A) — qal imperfect, expressing a resulting state that follows once the condition described occurs; the imperfect conveys an action tied to a future or repeated circumstance.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built around a temporal clause: u-ve-yom hera'ot bo basar chai ("and on the day living flesh appears in him"), followed by the main clause yitma ("he will be unclean"). The construct chain yom hera'ot — "day of its appearing" — uses the infinitive hera'ot nominally, so the clause reads more literally as "on the day of the appearing of living flesh in him," rather than as a finite verbal sentence. This construction ties the legal consequence (yitma) directly to the moment the condition is observed, without specifying who observes it.

The niphal form of hera'ot keeps the flesh itself as the subject of the "appearing," so the grammar centers on the flesh becoming visible rather than on a priest's act of seeing it, which the surrounding legal material (not shown here) usually specifies elsewhere. The qal imperfect yitma marks the change of status as an ongoing or resulting condition rather than a single completed event.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders basar ("flesh") with χρὼς ("skin, complexion") rather than a term for flesh generally, narrowing the Hebrew's broader term for tissue. The LXX also uses ὀφθῇ ("it should appear," aorist passive subjunctive) with ἂν, framing the clause as an indefinite conditional ("whenever it appears"), while the Hebrew infinitive construction frames it as a specific temporal marker ("on the day of its appearing"). The Vulgate's apparuerit (future perfect) similarly casts the clause as conditional ("when it will have appeared"), close in sense to the LXX's rendering but without reproducing the Hebrew's construct-infinitive phrasing.