Leviticus 14:55

Summary

This clause names two more categories covered by the preceding regulation: tzara'at ("serious disease/mark", H6883) affecting beged ("clothing", H0899B) and affecting bayit ("house", H1004B). It functions as the closing items in a list of situations to which a torah (instruction) applies.

Key words

tzara'at ("[the] serious disease of", H6883) — feminine singular noun in construct state, meaning it does not stand alone but links forward to what follows ("the tzara'at of X"). Here it governs two coordinated objects.

ha-beged ("the clothing", H0899B + H9009) — masculine singular noun with definite article, the first item to which the construct tzara'at is bound.

la-bayit ("and to the house", H1004B + H9005 + H9009) — the preposition le ("to", H9005) is prefixed directly to the article-bearing noun (contracted form la), and combined with the conjunction ve ("and", H9002) beforehand, marking this as the second parallel item.

u-le / ve-la (H9002 + H9005) — the repeated pattern conjunction+preposition ("and to...") shows the syntactic parallelism binding two nouns to the same governing construct noun tzara'at.

What the text says

The verse is built on a single construct chain: tzara'at ("disease/mark", H6883) stands in construct form, meaning grammatically it requires a following noun to complete its sense ("the tzara'at of ..."). Here it is completed twice, first by ha-beged ("the clothing") and then, via the coordinating structure ve-la-bayit ("and to the house"), by bayit ("house"). The repetition of the preposition le ("to", H9005) before each noun — first attached to beged as la- and then again before bayit — creates a balanced two-part list, both governed by the same initial construct noun. This construction indicates that the same term, tzara'at, applies to two distinct domains: fabric and dwellings, without introducing a new verb or new grammatical subject in this fragment. The sentence has no verb of its own here; it is a nominal listing clause, likely the tail end of a longer enumeration that began earlier in the surrounding verses.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders tzara'at as lepras ("leprosy/scaly disease"), a direct borrowing into the Greek disease-vocabulary, while the Vulgate uses leprae similarly. Modern renderings such as BSB and SBLIBRE translate H6883 as "mildew" or "moho" rather than "leprosy," reflecting a different understanding of the referent of tzara'at when applied to beged ("clothing") and bayit ("house") rather than to human skin.