Leviticus 13: The Priest Spends Most of the Chapter Waiting

At Tuesday's practice one of the boys on the team jogged over from the outfield with his sleeve pushed up and a red ring on his forearm about the size of a quarter, paler in the middle. He wanted to know if it was bad. I looked at it for longer than I had any reason to, said "Ask your mom tonight, I think she'll want the doctor," and kept both hands on the fungo bat the whole time.

Wednesday morning I opened Leviticus 13 and it took me about four verses to see what I'd done. A rising, a scab, a bright spot: you bring it to someone whose job is to look, and you don't diagnose it yourself.

What does the priest actually do in Leviticus 13?

He looks and waits and looks again, which is most of the chapter and slower going than I expected. If the spot is white and sits deeper than the skin and the hair in it has turned white, the priest says unclean and that's the end of it (verse 3). If it doesn't meet those marks, he "shuts up" the person for seven days and looks again on the seventh. If it's holding still he shuts him up seven more. Then comes verse 6, where the verdict turns out to be so small:

And the priest shall look on him again the seventh day: and, behold, if the plague be somewhat dark, and the plague spread not in the skin, the priest shall pronounce him clean: it is but a scab: and he shall wash his clothes, and be clean.

Leviticus 13:6

It is but a scab, after two weeks of being kept apart, and then he washes his clothes and goes home. The boil (verses 18 to 23), the burn (24 to 28) and the scalp (29 to 34) all run the same way, with a way out on the far side of the waiting. I count "clean" about as often as "unclean" in this chapter. Whoever wrote the rules was trying hard not to get the verdict wrong in either direction, and that isn't the picture most of us carry out of Sunday School.

I have a thin burn line on my left forearm from the table saw and a white scar over my right eyebrow from a trampoline, and neither one ever got me sent anywhere. Verses 2 and 3 are really a list of what separates the marks that matter from the ones that don't.

Why does the spreading matter more than the checklist?

In verses 35 and 36 a man has been shaved and shut up and then pronounced clean of a scall, and afterward it spreads. The priest is told he "shall not seek for yellow hair; he is unclean." The yellow hair was one of the tests back in verse 30, and here it gets dropped without ceremony, because spreading outranks everything else on the list. Verses 7 and 8 do the same thing for the scab. Clean once, seen again if it spreads, unclean the second time.

There's a small practical detail in verse 33 that I liked more than I should. The man is shaved, "but the scall shall he not shave." I'd guess the priest wants bare skin to look at and a spot he can still read, though the text doesn't say why. It reads like somebody who has done this before, and it reminded me of leaving the pencil line on a board until you've checked the cut against it.

Verses 12 and 13 looked wrong to me at first, and I went back over them twice before I'd let them stand. The leprosy covers the person from head to foot, and "it is all turned white: he is clean." My best guess, and it's only a guess, is that the priest is watching for whether the thing is still active, and a body gone white all over has nothing left to spread into. The next verses back this up. The moment "raw flesh appeareth" the man is unclean again (verses 14 and 15), and when the raw flesh turns white he's clean again (verses 16 and 17). Some people read the whole-body rule as a picture of complete repentance, and maybe so, but nothing in the chapter asks me to read it that way. I'm leaving it as a rule about skin and I'd rather be corrected than clever.

What about the garments, and was this even leprosy?

The last thirteen verses leave people alone and move to wool, linen and leather. A greenish or reddish patch in the cloth gets the same treatment as a patch on a man: shut it up seven days, look, and burn it if it has spread. If it hasn't, wash it and wait seven more (verse 54), and if the color still hasn't changed, burn it anyway (verse 55).

The word translated "leprosy" is wider than the disease we now call by that name. Scholars generally think it covered a range of skin conditions, and a greenish patch in a wool coat isn't Hansen's disease under any definition. So I take the Hebrew word to be closer to "a spreading blemish" than to one diagnosis, though that's my reading of what the scholars say, and the priest is doing the same job for a coat as for a person.

What happens when Jesus sends a leper to the priest?

In Mark 1 a man with leprosy kneels and says, "If thou wilt, thou canst make me clean" (verse 40). Jesus "put forth his hand, and touched him" (verse 41), says "I will; be thou clean," and the leprosy is gone. Then, in verse 44, he tells him to go and "shew thyself to the priest, and offer for thy cleansing those things which Moses commanded."

Healed, and then sent straight back to the priest.

The priests in Leviticus can't heal anybody, they can only say what's so, and Jesus leaves that job with them. I'd never set that verse beside this chapter before this week.

Chapter 14 picks up from there, and the first thing it does is turn the direction of travel around. When the man comes back, "the priest shall go forth out of the camp" and look at him (Leviticus 14:3). The clean and unclean words are the same ones I was working through in Leviticus 11 and the pulled pork sandwich, and the sick man in Philippians 2 who hated that people knew came to mind when I reached verse 45 here.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did the priests heal leprosy?

No, and the chapter never suggests it. They diagnose and they pronounce, and healing is somebody else's work. In Mark 1 even Jesus sends the healed man to one.

Was unclean the same thing as sinful?

I don't think so, and I can't find anything in the chapter that says otherwise. It says nothing about what the person did, only about what the skin is doing. A man with a scab that turns out to be a scab goes home clean and nobody has accused him of anything. Later sermons mixed the two together a good deal, but that isn't in this chapter.

Why would a whole body gone white count as clean?

Spread, I think. I laid it out above, and I'd like to hear a better reading if you've got one.

Is this just ancient public health?

Partly. Waiting a week to see whether something spreads is sound whether or not anybody had a word for germs. It's also ritual law, and I don't think you get to pick just one.

I'll say plainly what I don't like about this chapter, and it isn't the seven days. Everything before verse 44 is slow, careful and willing to be wrong in the person's favor. Then comes verse 45, where the one who is unclean has to tear his own clothes, cover his lip and call out "Unclean, unclean" to anyone who comes near, and verse 46 where he lives alone outside the camp for as long as it lasts. Nobody brings him water in that chapter. The patience was all for the diagnosis. In Numbers 12:15 the whole camp stopped moving for seven days until Miriam was brought back in, and here nobody does. I can't make that come out comfortable by calling it quarantine.

— D.