“The leper in whom the plague is shall wear torn clothes, and the hair of his head shall hang loose. He shall cover his upper lip, and shall cry, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’
The person with tzaraat shall make himself known by wearing torn clothes and calling out 'unclean'
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְהַצָּרוּעַ אֲשֶׁר־בּוֹ הַנֶּגַע בְּגָדָיו יִהְיוּ פְרֻמִים וְרֹאשׁוֹ יִהְיֶה פָרוּעַ וְעַל־שָׂפָם יַעְטֶה וְטָמֵא טָמֵא יִקְרָא
Literary form: a ritual instruction
Applicability
How the catalog describes where and when this commandment applies. These are independent descriptions, not a verdict on which laws still count.
No applicability flags are recorded for this commandment.
Classical halakhic consequences
The consequences the classical halakhah attaches to this commandment, grouped by who imposes them. Where a category has none recorded, that absence is itself meaningful.
Imposed by a court
No court-imposed penalty is recorded.
At the hands of Heaven
No divinely-imposed consequence is recorded.
Ritual remedy
No ritual remedy is recorded.
How the streams of Judaism treat this commandment
The streams of Judaism read the same commandment differently — an ongoing plurality, not a ranking. Each position below is reported as the catalog records it; none is presented as the correct one.
- Orthodox Inoperative pending the Temple
- Conservative Not binding
- Reform Not binding
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- Karaite Not binding
24 of 613 commandments have been examined in depth so far — this one is queued.
How later traditions received this commandment
How later traditions read or reworked this commandment, each attributed to its own voice. The catalog’s own classification of each reception is shown as it records it, never adopted as GEBible’s.
Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls)
- 4QMMT (4Q396-397); 11QTemple (11Q19) XLV-XLVIII read it more strictly
Rabbinic aggadah
- Vayikra Rabbah 16:1-6 expanded it homiletically
- b. Arakhin 15b-16a expanded it homiletically
Josephus
- Ant. 3.264 rationalized it
- Ag. Ap. 1.229-250 (with 1.279-286) The catalog describes this reception as: apologetic rebuttal Josephus rebuts Manetho's claim that Israel originated as expelled lepers; the passage concerns anti-Jewish polemic rather than reception of the Levitical purity law itself
The New Testament
- Mark 1:40-45 reinterpreted it Jesus heals a man with ṣāraʿat and directs him to the priest per Lev 14, presupposing the diagnostic-exclusion framework while dramatizing its reversal
- Luke 17:11-19 reinterpreted it ten men with ṣāraʿat stand 'at a distance,' enacting the spatial exclusion of Lev 13:45-46
The Church Fathers
- Origen, Homiliae in Leviticum 8 read it allegorically
Beside the older legal codes of its world
The commandment set beside the ancient Near-Eastern legal collections scholars compare it to — a descriptive comparison, not a claim of dependence.
- middle assyrian laws Middle Assyrian law prescribes mandatory public body-covering (veiling) or its prohibition as a visible status-marker distinguishing social categories of women in public space, paralleling the structural logic of the meṣora's obligatory mourning display as a status-marking visible to the community Relationship to the parallel: shared theme Tablet A §40 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (Scholars Press, 1997)
Where this commandment meets modern human-rights frameworks
One modern normative lens, attributed to it — not GEBible’s assessment. Each row names the framework it measures against and the catalog’s own classification of the relation.
This framework catalogues tensions; it records agreement in only one of its entries. The near-total tension rate is the shape of the instrument, not a finding.
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Article 17
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
The commandment requires a person with a skin condition to publicly announce their diagnostic status and wear stigmatizing mourning dress — a compelled disclosure of medical information that conflicts with ICCPR Article 17's protection against arbitrary interference with privacy, which extends to personal health information under contemporary human-rights interpretation.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
The prescribed costume of torn garments, disheveled hair, covered lip, and the verbal cry 'Impure! Impure!' constitutes a state-mandated performance of stigmatized bodily status; modern bodily-autonomy norms protect individuals against compelled public self-presentation that marks their bodies as sources of social danger.