Leviticus 13:16

Summary

Leviticus 13:16 describes a diagnostic turning point in the skin-disease examination: if the basar ("flesh", H1320) that had been chai ("living", H2416A) — i.e., raw or exposed — reverses itself and nehpakh ("is turned", H2015) to lavan ("white", H3836), the affected person must come back to the priest for re-inspection.

Key words

• yashuv ("it will return", H7725H) — qal imperfect, describing the flesh's changing condition as an ongoing/future process, not yet completed.
• basar ha-chai ("the living flesh", H1320 + H2416A) — the noun with attached adjective marks flesh that is raw or exposed (previously diagnosed as such), the technical condition being monitored.
• nehpakh ("it is turned", H2015) — niphal (passive/reflexive) sequential perfect; the flesh does not act on itself actively but "is turned" or "turns itself," marking the change of state as the narrative's next fixed point.
• lavan ("white", H3836) — adjective marking the resulting skin color, the visual criterion the priest must assess.
• ba' ("he will come/go", H0935G) — qal sequential perfect, the resulting action: the person's movement toward the priest once the color change occurs.

What the text says

The verse opens with the compound conditional 'o khi ("or if", H0176A + H3588A), linking this case to the preceding verses' diagnostic sequence (a new "if" scenario following a previous condition). The subject is ha-basar ha-chai, "the living flesh" — flesh marked by the definite article twice (on both noun and adjective, H9009), indicating a specific, previously identified condition (the raw or exposed flesh mentioned earlier in the chapter).

The verb chain uses two sequential perfects (nehpakh, ba') following the initial imperfect yashuv, a common Hebrew narrative construction: the imperfect sets up the conditional action ("if it returns/changes"), and the sequential perfects continue the consequence ("and it is turned... and he comes"). The niphal form of nehpakh leaves ambiguous whether the flesh changes passively or through its own reversal — the grammatical voice does not specify an external agent causing the whitening. The final clause, u-va' el ha-kohen ("and he comes to the priest"), places the responding action on the person (not stated explicitly as subject, but implied), who must return for further priestly examination once the color shifts to white.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders ha-basar ha-chai as ho chrōs ho hygiēs ("the healthy skin"), using a term for health/soundness rather than "life," and phrases the change with apokatastē ("restored") and metabalē leukē ("changes to white"), close in sense to the Hebrew but shifting the semantic frame from "living flesh" to "healthy skin."

The Vulgate diverges more substantially: it reads "si rursum versa fuerit in alborem, et totum hominem operuerit" ("if it is turned again to whiteness, and covers the whole man"), adding a clause about the whiteness covering the entire body — content not present in the Hebrew of this verse, which only states that the flesh turns white and the person goes to the priest.