Leviticus 13:57

Summary

The verse gives the concluding case in a legal sequence about garments or leather objects affected by a mold/mildew-like plague: if the affection appears again (od, H5750) in the garment, warp, woof, or any leather article, it is classified as "breaking out" (porachat, H6524A), and the affected item must be burned.

Key words

• tera'eh ("it will appear", H7200G) — niphal imperfect, passive/reflexive form of the root "to see": the plague itself is the grammatical subject that "shows itself," not something a person actively observes.
• od ("again", H5750) — marks recurrence; the condition applies specifically to a second appearance after a prior situation (implied by the wider context of Leviticus 13).
• porachat ("breaking out", H6524A) — qal participle, feminine singular, agreeing with hi' ("it", H1931). The participle form frames the plague as an ongoing, active process rather than a completed state.
• tisrefenu ("you will burn it", H8313) — qal imperfect, second person masculine, with the pronominal suffix -nu ("it/him", H9033) attached, combining subject and object in a single verbal form.
• khol-keli-'or ("every article of hide", H3605 + H3627 + H5785) — a construct chain ("every article of... hide"), stacking three nouns in construct relationship to specify the category of leather objects included under the law.

What the text says

The verse opens with the conditional particles ve-'im ("and if", H9002/H0518A) followed by the niphal verb tera'eh, establishing a conditional clause where the plague is the one "appearing" — the niphal stem places the mold in the grammatical role of subject undergoing perception, rather than a person perceiving it. This is reinforced by od ("again"), signaling that the clause addresses a recurrence after some prior state (not detailed within this single verse but implied by the sequence of cases in the chapter).

The list of possible locations — beged ("garment", H0899B), sheti ("warp", H8359), 'erev ("woof", H6154B), and kol-keli-'or ("every article of hide", H3605+H3627+H5785) — is joined by four instances of 'o ("or", H0176A), enumerating distinct categories of textile and leather objects rather than describing a single item. The predicate porachat hi' ("it is breaking out", H6524A + H1931) uses a participle rather than a finite verb, which grammatically presents the spreading as a characteristic or ongoing condition of the plague at the moment of the second appearance.

The final clause switches to direct address: tisrefenu ("you will burn it") is a second-person imperfect verb with an attached object suffix, followed by an explicit resumption using 'et 'asher bo hanaga' ("that which the plague is in it", H0853+H0834A+H9033+H9009+H5061). This resumptive phrase re-identifies the object to be burned, ensuring the referent (the specific garment or leather article carrying the plague) is unambiguous despite the syntactic distance from the initial list.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders hanaga' ("the plague", H5061) with λέπρα ("leprosy"), a technical term more specific than the Hebrew's general naga' ("plague/mark"). The Vulgate describes the condition as "lepra volatilis et vaga" ("flying and wandering leprosy"), adding descriptive qualifiers ("volatilis et vaga") not present in the Hebrew text, which uses only the participle porachat ("breaking out").