Leviticus 13:6

Summary

The priest examines the affected person a second time, on the seventh day (of the second isolation period), and if the skin condition has faded and has not spread, the priest declares the person pure — identifying it as a skin rash — after which the person washes their garments and becomes pure.

Key words

• ra'Ah ("he will see", H7200G) — qal sequential perfect; continues the narrative chain of priestly actions, here meaning "he will examine/inspect."
• sheni'It ("a second [time]", H8145) — feminine ordinal, marking that this is a repeat examination distinct from the first one on the seventh day mentioned earlier in the chapter's procedure.
• keHah ("it has become dull", H3543A) — piel perfect, describing the completed change of the nega' ("plague", H5061) — its color/intensity has diminished.
• fasah ("it has spread", H6581) — qal perfect, negated by lo' ("not", H3808), stating the condition has not extended further in the 'or ("skin", H5785).
• tiharO ("he will declare pure", H2891) — piel sequential perfect with pronominal suffix "him," the priest's formal declarative act, distinct from taHer ("he will be pure", H2891) later in the verse, which is qal and describes the person's resulting state.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of sequential perfect verbs (vav-consecutive), a common structure in this legal-narrative text: ra'Ah ("he will see"), tiharO ("he will declare pure"), khiBes ("he will wash"), and taHer ("he will be pure") all follow this pattern, presenting a sequence of actions and outcomes tied to the priest's examination. The repetition of ko.Hen ("priest", H3548) twice reinforces that the priest is the sole agent of both inspection and the declarative act.

Notably, the same root tahar (H2891) appears twice with different stems: tiharO (piel, "he will declare pure") describes the priest's active, causative pronouncement, while taHer (qal, "he will be pure") describes the simple resulting state of the person after washing. This distinction — a declarative/causative act versus a resulting state — is grammatically visible in Hebrew but is typically flattened in translation, where both become "declare clean" and "be clean" without indicating the stem shift.

The phrase mispaChat hi' ("[is] a skin rash, it", H4556 + H1931) uses a feminine noun with a feminine pronoun to identify/classify the condition, functioning as a naming clause within the priest's assessment.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders tiharO ("he will declare pure") as καθαριεῖ and inserts the clause σημασία γάρ ἐστιν ("for it is a mark/sign"), differing slightly from the Hebrew mispaChat hi' ("it is a skin rash"), which uses a specific term for a rash rather than a general "sign." The Vulgate similarly renders this as scabies est ("it is a scab/mange"), closer to the Hebrew's specific skin-condition terminology than the LXX's more general wording.