Leviticus 13:18

Summary

Leviticus 13:18 opens a new case-law section on skin conditions, describing a situation where a shechin ("boil", H7822) has appeared on someone's skin and has subsequently healed. The verse sets up the conditional scenario that the following verses (not included here) will address regarding priestly examination.

Key words

• vaSar ("flesh", H1320) — masculine singular noun, here referring to a person's body or skin as the site where the condition appears.
• ki ("if/that", H3588A) — conditional particle introducing the case, typical of legal/casuistic formulations in this chapter ("if flesh has...").
• she.Chin ("a boil", H7822) — masculine singular noun naming the specific skin ailment under discussion.
• nir.Pa' ("it will be healed", H7495) — niphal (passive) verb in sequential perfect form, indicating the boil's healing as a completed action that follows logically from its appearance; the niphal stem marks the flesh as the recipient of the healing rather than an agent.
• ve. on nirPa' (H9001) — the narrative vav connecting this clause to the prior condition, structuring the verse as "if X happens... and then Y happens."

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a casuistic (case-law) construction, marked by ki ("if", H3588A), which is standard in Leviticus 13 for introducing diagnostic scenarios a priest must evaluate. The clause yihyeh vo be'oro shechin ("there will be on him, on his skin, a boil") uses the qal imperfect yihYeh ("it will be", H1961) to describe the emergence of the condition as a potential future event, grammatically open-ended until the specific case is invoked.

The doubling of "on him" (vo, H9033) and "on his skin" (be'oro, H9023 with H5785) is a feature of Hebrew's tendency toward specifying redundancy — first locating the boil generally on the person, then narrowing to the skin specifically. This is not merely repetitive in the source language but reflects a common Hebrew syntactic pattern for precision in legal or diagnostic text.

The final verb, nirPa' ("it will be healed", H7495), is in the niphal stem, marking the flesh as undergoing healing passively — no agent is specified. The sequential perfect form links this healing as the narrative continuation of the prior imperfect clause, producing a temporal sequence: first the boil appears, then it heals. This grammatical sequence sets up the conditional case that subsequent verses will resolve.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the doubled Hebrew phrase "on him, on his skin" (vo... be'oro) with a single phrase, "ἐν τῷ δέρματι αὐτοῦ" ("in his skin"), omitting the separate "on him" (vo, H9033). The Vulgate similarly consolidates this into "in qua" ("in which"), referring back to "caro et cutis" ("flesh and skin"), treating both nouns together rather than preserving the Hebrew's nested prepositional structure.