Leviticus 14:44

Summary

The verse describes the priest's second inspection of a house suspected of a contaminating plague: he returns, observes that the affliction has spread on the wall, and declares it a malignant tsara'at, rendering the house ritually unclean.

Key words

• Va' ("he will come", H0935G) — qal sequential perfect, continuing the narrative chain of the priest's actions after the seven-day waiting period mentioned earlier in the chapter.
• pasah ("it has spread", H6581) — qal perfect, marking a completed action prior to the moment of observation: the spreading is already accomplished when the priest looks.
• mam'eret ("malignant", H3992) — hiphil participle, feminine singular, agreeing with tsara'at; the participle form frames the affliction as an ongoing, active process ("the one causing harm") rather than a static condition.
• hi' ("it", H1931) — feminine personal pronoun, resuming tsara'at (feminine noun) in the first predicate clause.
• hu' ("it", H1931) — masculine personal pronoun, resuming bayit ("house", masculine) in the second predicate clause.

What the text says

The verse opens with two verbs in sequential perfect, Va' ("he will come", H0935G) and ra'ah ("he will see", H7200G), which continue the narrative sequence from the preceding verses describing the priest's return visit. The particle hinneh ("there!", H2009) introduces the content of what the priest observes, functioning almost like a direct report of perception: what follows is presented as the priest's own finding. That finding is expressed with pasah ("it has spread", H6581), a perfect verb indicating that the spreading of ha-nega' ("the plague", H5061) had already occurred by the time of the inspection.

The verse then contains two short nominal (verbless) clauses stating the priest's verdict. The first, tsara'at mam'eret hi' ("it is a malignant tsara'at"), uses the feminine pronoun hi' (H1931) to link back to the feminine noun tsara'at (H6883), with mam'eret (H3992) as a hiphil participle describing the destructive, active character of the affliction rather than a fixed state. The second clause, tame' hu' ("unclean it is"), uses the masculine pronoun hu' (H1931), which grammatically points back to bayit ("house", H1004B), a masculine noun — so the uncleanness is predicated of the house itself, distinct from the preceding clause that characterizes the plague.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the Hebrew's declarative hinneh...pasah ("there! it has spread") as a conditional clause, εἰ διακέχυται ("if it has spread"), framing the spreading as a hypothetical condition for the priest's verdict rather than a stated fact already observed. The Vulgate's reversam lepram ("the leprosy having returned") diverges from the Hebrew pasah ("it has spread", H6581) by describing recurrence rather than spreading, and adds a phrase not present in the Hebrew word list, parietes respersos maculis ("walls spattered with stains").