“This shall be the law of the leper in the day of his cleansing: He shall be brought to the priest,
The leper shall be purified through the prescribed ritual involving two birds, cedar wood, scarlet yarn, and hyssop
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
זֹאת תִּהְיֶה תּוֹרַת הַמְּצֹרָע בְּיוֹם טָהֳרָתוֹ וְהוּבָא אֶל־הַכֹּהֵן
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו שתהיה הטהרה מן הצרעת כמעשה הכתוב והוא עץ ארז ואזוב ושני תולעת ושתי צפרים חיות ומים חיים ושיעשה בהם כל מה שנאמר. ובזה המעשה בעצמו יטהר האדם כמו שבאר הכתוב. הנה כבר התבאר לך כי מיני הדברים המטהרים מן הטומאה שלשה מינים, אחד כולל ושניהם מיוחדים בשני מינים ומיני טומאות. אמנם הכולל הוא הטהרה במים, והמין השני מי נדה והוא דבר מיוחד בטומאת מת, והמין השלישי עץ ארז ואזוב ושני תולעת ושתי צפרים ומים חיים והוא דבר מיוחד בצרעת. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו כלם רצה לומר טהרת מצורע בראשון במסכת נגעים. (מצורע, טומאת צרעת פרק י"א):
That is that He commanded us that the purification from tsaraat be according to the process written in Scripture (Leviticus 14). And that is [with] cedar wood, hyssop, crimson dyed cloth, two living birds and living waters and that he do everything stated, with those things. And through this exact process, the person becomes pure - as Scripture explains. Behold it has already been made clear to you that there are three types of things that purify from impurity - one of them is general and two of them are specific to two types of impurity. Indeed, the general one is purification in water; the second type is the [sprinkling of] purification water, and that is something specific for the impurity of a corpse; and the third type is cedar wood, hyssop, scarlet dyed cloth, two living birds and living waters - and that is something specific for tsaraat. And the regulations of this commandment - meaning the purification of someone with tsaraat - have all already been explained in the first [chapter] of Tractate Negaim. (See Parashat Metzora; Mishneh Torah, Defilement by Leprosy 11.)
Hebrew: Sefer HaMitzvot, Warsaw 1883 (public domain). English: Sefaria Edition, trans. Rabbi Francis Nataf, 2021 (CC0). Via Sefaria; translator’s footnotes omitted.
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.
- Requires a standing Temple
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 Binding, with modification
- Conservative Not binding
- Reform Not binding
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- Karaite 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)
- 4Q274 (Tohorot A) read it more strictly
Rabbinic aggadah
- Vayikra Rabbah 16:1 expanded it homiletically
Josephus
- Ant. 3.261-269 rationalized it
The New Testament
- Matthew 8:4 affirmed it Jesus instructs the cleansed leper to show himself to the priest and offer the Mosaic gift, presupposing the Levitical purification procedure
- Mark 1:44 affirmed it Parallel command to fulfill the Mosaic offering 'for a testimony'
- Luke 17:14 affirmed it Ten lepers sent to the priests; healing tied to the priestly inspection framework
- Hebrews 9:19 reinterpreted it Invokes scarlet wool and hyssop typologically, but in the context of the Sinai covenant-ratification sprinkling (Exod 24), not the metzora rite directly; the elements are shared cultic vocabulary rather than a reuse of this specific commandment
The Church Fathers
- Origen, Homilies on Leviticus 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.
- hittite ritual texts Hittite elimination rituals transfer impurity or plague to an animal that is subsequently driven away, employing the same transfer-and-release structural pattern as the Levitical two-bird rite in which the living bird carries the meṣora's impurity into the open field. Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence Ritual of Uḫḫamuwa (CTH 410) and related elimination rites Kümmel, *Ersatzrituale für den hethitischen König* (StBoT 3, 1967); Wright, *The Disposal of Impurity* (SBLDS 101, 1987)
- mesopotamian incantation series Mesopotamian incantation series in which illness or impurity is symbolically transferred to substitute objects that are then burned or removed share the substitution-and-elimination logic of the two-bird rite, but include verbal incantation entirely absent from the Priestly version. Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence Šurpu Tablets I–II; Maqlû Tablet I Reiner, *Šurpu* (AfO Beiheft 11, 1958); Abusch and Schwemer, *Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Rituals* (Brill, 2011–2020)
- hittite ritual texts Hittite elimination rituals transfer plague, disease, or impurity to a living animal (ram, bull, donkey) that is subsequently driven away or released into uninhabited or enemy territory, paralleling the structural logic of releasing the living bird 'over the open field' to carry the meṣora's impurity out of the community. Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence Ashella ritual (CTH 394) and Pulisa ritual (CTH 407): elimination rites against army plague using a substitute ram or bull driven into enemy territory Kümmel, *Ersatzrituale für den hethitischen König* (StBoT 3, 1967); Wright, *The Disposal of Impurity* (SBLDS 101, 1987), ch. 1-2
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.
No tension with the catalogued modern frameworks is recorded here.