Leviticus 13:24

Summary

Leviticus 13:24 addresses a case where a person has a burn from fire on their skin, and the healing tissue within that burn produces a discolored spot — either reddish-white or plain white. The verse sets up the diagnostic scenario that the following verses (25 onward) will evaluate for ritual purity.

Key words

• mikhvat ("a burn of", H4348) — feminine singular construct, forming the phrase "burn of fire" (mikhvat esh), naming the specific type of skin injury.
• michyat ("[the] raw spot of", H4241) — feminine singular construct, linked to ha-mikkvah ("the burn"), denoting the living/raw tissue within the burned area, not simply "healed" skin.
• baheret ("a bright spot", H0934) — feminine singular noun, the technical term for the discolored mark that must be assessed.
• adamdemet ("reddish", H0125) — feminine singular adjective, in construct form, qualifying the color of the baheret alongside levanah ("white").
• ve-hayetah ("and it will be", H1961) — qal sequential perfect, continuing the narrative logic begun by the imperfect yihyeh, marking the outcome that follows once the condition (the burn) is established.

What the text says

The verse is built as a conditional sentence: the particle ki ("if", H3588A) introduces the protasis with yihyeh ("it will be", H1961) in the imperfect, describing the hypothetical presence of a burn — mikhvat esh — "on his skin" (be-oro, from 'or, "skin", H5785, with the third-person suffix -o). The apodosis then switches to the sequential perfect ve-hayetah, a standard construction in Hebrew casuistic law where the imperfect sets the condition and the perfect-with-vav continues the consequence in the same time frame.

The core diagnostic object is the michyat ha-mikkvah, literally "the living/raw flesh of the burn" — a construct chain identifying the specific tissue inside the burn site that develops the mark. That mark is called a baheret, described by two color adjectives, levanah ("white") and adamdemet ("reddish"), joined by 'o ("or", H0176A), and the sentence closes by repeating 'o levanah ("or white"), presenting two possible colorations to be evaluated: reddish-white or plain white.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew michyat ("raw/living flesh") is rendered in the LXX as τὸ ὑγιασθὲν ("the healed part") and in the Vulgate as sanata ("healed"), both shifting the sense from "raw living tissue" toward "healed tissue." The Vulgate also renders baheret as cicatricem ("scar"), a more specific term than the Hebrew's general "bright spot." The LXX expands the two color terms levanah and adamdemet into a longer descriptive phrase (αὐγάζον τηλαυγὲς λευκόν, ὑποπυρρίζον ἢ ἔκλευκον), offering more elaborate visual qualifiers than the Hebrew's simple adjective pair.