Leviticus 13:17

Summary

The verse describes the priest's second examination of a skin affliction: if the nega' ("plague", H5061) has turned completely white, the priest formally declares the afflicted person pure. The sentence closes with an emphatic restatement that the person is indeed pure.

Key words

• ra'ahu (from ra'ah, "he will see", H7200) — sequential perfect with 3ms object suffix "him"; continues the narrative chain begun in the preceding verses, marking the priest's renewed visual inspection.
• neh.Pakh ("it has been turned", H2015) — niphal perfect, a passive/reflexive form. The plague itself is the grammatical subject undergoing change; no external agent of the turning is named.
• le.lavan ("to white", H3836 with preposition H9005) — the preposition le ("to") marks direction of change, expressing that the nega' has moved into the state of whiteness, not merely that it "is" white.
• ti.Har ("he will declare pure", H2891) — piel sequential perfect, an intensive/factitive stem indicating that the priest performs a declarative act (pronouncing purity) rather than simply observing a state.
• ta.Hor hu ("[is] pure he", H2889 + H1931) — adjective followed by independent pronoun, a nominal clause placed after the verbal declaration, restating the outcome emphatically and without a verb "to be."

What the text says

The verse is built from a chain of sequential perfects (ra'ahu, ti.Har) joined by the narrative vav (H9001), a common structure in legal/procedural Hebrew describing a fixed sequence of actions: the priest looks, then — introduced by the presentative hinneh ("there!", H2009) — a condition is observed, and finally the priest acts. The niphal form neh.Pakh places the emphasis on the change happening to the nega' itself, with the priest as observer rather than cause; the priest's own active role appears only in the piel ti.Har, where he performs the legal act of declaring purity, distinct from the physical change of the skin condition.

The final clause, tahor hu ("pure he"), is a verbless nominal sentence, syntactically independent from the priest's declaration. This creates a two-part structure: first the priest's official pronouncement (ve.tihar hakohen et-hanega'), then a separate confirming statement of the resulting status (tahor hu). The direct object marker 'et (H0853) before hanega' shows that "the plague" here functions as a metonym for the afflicted person, the object of the priest's declaration.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders le.lavan as εἰς τὸ λευκόν ("into the white"), preserving the directional sense of the Hebrew preposition le. The Vulgate (VULCLEM) compresses the entire verse, omitting any mention of the color turning white and stating only "considerabit eum sacerdos, et mundum esse decernet" ("the priest will examine him and decide he is clean"), lacking an equivalent to neh.Pakh le.lavan and to the closing emphatic clause tahor hu found in the Hebrew and reflected in the LXX's καθαρός ἐστιν.