Leviticus 13:5, commentary and pictures

The verse belongs to the laws of cleansing given to ancient Israel in Leviticus 12 to 15, also grouped as Leviticus 11 to 15, regulating uncleanness and leprosy. It directs the priest to look on a suspected skin disease on the seventh day, and if the plague is at a stay in his sight and has not changed or spread in the skin, to shut the person up, keep apart, or keep under observation in isolation seven days more. The chapter's instructions about leprosy and other unsanitary conditions are sanitary guidance about contagious or infectious disease.

As one of the laws of sanitation promulgated by Moses, it still stands at the head of sanitary law, and this enduring superiority proves divine inspiration guided Moses. The law shows that although God is described as the healer, His people were also to take proper precautions. The law of cleansing made a person or object visibly clean before the sanctuary's further cleansing with blood.

Leprosy is a horrible, dread, acknowledged incurable disease and a fitting type or prefigure of sin as a plague, a moral disease, and mortal sin. Sin so typified is transgression of the law and all unrighteousness embracing every kind of evil thing, universally prevalent, infectious, incurable by human means, rooted in the heart and corrupting the whole person, with outward acts revealing a deeper evil in motives, purposes, and desires. Like leprosy, sin never gets well by itself and is contagious, so the sinner contaminates the very atmosphere, introduces pollution where there was comparative purity, and leads others into sin, an influence more to be feared than the infection of a leper.

The leper was to experience complete cleansing from the dread malady, considered no less a miracle than raising the dead. It was a matter of faith in the cleansing power of the Author of the ceremonies, showing faith in Christ, and only those who seek help from the great Physician, repent sincerely, and believe in him can be cleansed by his blood, connecting the law with Jesus' power to heal. Its setting points to the need for sin to be removed, with the lesson that healing requires the proud self to die and the old person to be put off. And the cleansing work serves as an example for God's people not to abandon the cleansing truths given to them, including health reform, but to become clean vessels fit to receive God's Spirit and the latter rain. Simon's enlarging white eruption and whitening eyebrows place his story in the setting of this examination of suspected leprosy.