Leviticus 13:25

Summary

The priest examines a burn scar and finds that the hair within the bright spot has turned white and the spot appears deeper than the surrounding skin. On this basis he identifies the condition as a serious skin disease that has broken out in the burn, and declares the person unclean.

Key words

• ra'Ah ("he will see", H7200) — qal sequential perfect; continues the narrative chain begun in the preceding verses, marking the priest's act of examination as the next step in a fixed procedure.
• nehPakh ("it has been turned", H2015) — niphal (passive) perfect; the hair's change to white is presented as something that has happened to it, not an action the hair performs itself.
• mar'Eh ("appearance", H4758) — construct form ("appearance of..."), linking directly to the suffixed ha ("its") to mean "its appearance," i.e., the visual quality of the spot.
• tzaRa'at ("serious skin disease", H6883) — feminine singular noun appearing twice, each time paired with the pronoun hi' ("it", H1931), forming an emphatic identification: "it is tzara'at."
• tiMe' ("he will declare unclean", H2930A) — piel sequential perfect; the intensive stem marks this as a formal, declarative act by the priest rather than a simple observation.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of sequential perfect verbs (ra'ah, tim'e') linked by the narrative ve-, which in Biblical Hebrew narrative typically signals consecutive actions following an initial verb form earlier in the passage. This creates a procedural rhythm: the priest sees (ra'ah), then observes conditions (marked by hinneh, "there!", drawing attention to the visual evidence), and finally declares (tim'e'). The two conditions the priest checks — hair turned white (nehpakh se'ar lavan) and appearance deeper than the skin (mar'eh ... 'amok min ha'or) — are stated as completed facts (perfect verb forms and stative adjective) rather than hypotheticals in the Hebrew itself, though other versions render them conditionally.

Two clauses in the verse use the pattern noun + hi' ("it/she"): tzara'at hi' ("it is tzara'at") and nega' tzara'at hi' ("it is a plague of tzara'at"). This repetition, with the feminine pronoun agreeing with the feminine noun tzara'at, frames the diagnosis as a formal, twice-stated identification bracketing the priest's declaration of impurity — the visual signs are named as tzara'at before the priest acts, and the act of declaring unclean is again justified by naming it nega' tzara'at ("a plague of tzara'at") at the close.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew presents the priest's observations as direct statements of fact (hair "has turned," spot "is" deep), while the Reina-Valera 1909 (RV1909), BSB, and SBLIBRE render these as conditional clauses ("si el pelo se hubiere vuelto..." / "If the hair... has turned"), introducing an "if" not explicit in the Hebrew wording itself, though the sequential grammar implies a conditional procedure. The Vulgate's contaminabit eum ("he will contaminate/defile him") for tim'e' uses a verb of defiling rather than the "declare unclean" sense reflected in other renderings. The LXX's ταπεινὴ ("low/humble") for 'amok ("deep") uses a term of lowness rather than depth, and its ἁφὴ λέπρας ("touch/infection of leprosy") for nega' tzara'at differs slightly from the Hebrew nega' ("plague/mark").