Leviticus 15:13, commentary and pictures

When the discharge has stopped, the man with an issue is to count seven days for his cleansing, then wash his clothes and bathe his flesh in running water, after which he is clean. The counting brings him to the eighth day, when he becomes clean, placing this rite with the other Levitical purifications in which the eighth day stands for the new creation. The bathing is to be in running water, which is the cleanest and purest water, and ample supply of such water was available for the washing. The seven days with washing add a further period of isolation after the symptoms have ceased, guarding against spread or return of infection and protecting the community from epidemic, so that the requirement serves sanitary cleanliness.

The same washing also serves reverence, keeping the person clean and requiring cleanness when coming before the Lord. The regulation belongs to the laws of uncleanness, whose provisions concerning uncleanness and leprosy make leprosy a fitting type of sin and display the exceeding sinfulness of sin in a cleansing object-lesson. It belongs to the law of cleansing by which a thing had to be made visibly clean before its real cleansing with blood, a physical cleansing that prepared for the cleansing of the sanctuary, although in God's sight it was moral defilement and not mere physical uncleanness that defiled the sanctuary.

The seven days, washing of clothes, and bathing belong to the yearly cycle of Levitical sanctuary services that typified Christ's ministry, pointing forward to Jesus Christ as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world; those oft-repeated services represented a work Christ accomplished once for all, and seeing Him in these details gives them new life and makes them a blessing. The cleansing instruction is part of the cleansing work that parallels the health reform, by which men become clean vessels ready to receive God's Spirit and the latter rain.