Leviticus 13:3

Summary

The verse describes the priest's visual examination of a skin condition: he inspects the affected area on the skin of the flesh, checks whether the hair within it has turned white and whether the lesion appears sunken relative to the surrounding skin. If these two signs are present, the text identifies it as nega tzara'at ("a plague of tzara'at") and states that the priest, upon a second examination, must declare the person unclean.

Key words

• ra'ah ("he will see", H7200G) — appears twice (word 2 and word 31), both as sequential perfect forms (vav + perfect) that continue a narrative chain of actions: the priest sees, evaluates signs, then sees again before pronouncing judgment.
• nega ("plague", H5061) — occurs three times, twice in construct form (word 27: "plague of…"), linking directly to tzara'at to form the technical phrase "a plague of tzara'at."
• tzara'at ("a serious skin disease", H6883) — feminine singular noun naming the specific condition being diagnosed; the pronoun hu ("it", H1931) that follows functions as a copula-like affirmation ("it is...").
• hafakh ("it has turned", H2015) — qal perfect (completed action) describing the hair's color change, distinct grammatically from the sequential perfects used for the priest's actions.
• tamé ("he will declare unclean", H2930A) — piel (intensive) stem, sequential perfect, marking the priest's formal declarative act as the culminating verb of the chain.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a chain of sequential perfects (ve- + perfect verb), a common narrative structure in legal/instructional Hebrew that presents a sequence of dependent actions: "he will see... it has turned white... [it] is deep... it is a plague... he will see... he will declare unclean." This chaining shows that the priest's declaration depends on a two-stage visual process — an initial inspection (word 2) and a confirming inspection (word 31) — with the diagnostic criteria (hair color, depth of the lesion) stated in between using non-sequential perfect and adjectival forms.

The construct chains ma'reh ha-nega ("appearance of the plague") and nega tzara'at ("plague of tzara'at") show Hebrew's genitive-like construct pattern, where two nouns combine without a separate word for "of." The final identification, nega tzara'at hu ("it is a plague of tzara'at"), uses the independent pronoun hu to assert identity, a construction distinct from a verbal predicate.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders tzara'at (H6883) as λέπρα (lepra), and the Vulgate similarly uses lepra. The BSB translates this same term as "skin disease," while RV1909 and SBLIBRE retain "lepra." The Hebrew term itself is broader than the modern clinical sense of leprosy, referring generally to a serious skin affliction, but the LXX and Vulgate's use of lepra/lepra established the tradition followed by RV1909 and SBLIBRE.