It shall be on the seventh day, that he shall shave all his hair off his head and his beard and his eyebrows, even all his hair he shall shave off. He shall wash his clothes, and he shall bathe his body in water. Then he shall be clean.
The leper shall shave all his hair on the seventh day of purification
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְהָיָה בַיּוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי יְגַלַּח אֶת־כָּל־שְׂעָרוֹ אֶת־רֹאשׁוֹ וְאֶת־זְקָנוֹ וְאֵת גַּבֹּת עֵינָיו וְאֶת־כָּל־שְׂעָרוֹ יְגַלֵּחַ
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 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)
- 11Q19 (Temple Scroll) 48-49 The catalog describes this reception as: related stringency (segregation, not shaving) Cols. 48-49 legislate the exclusion of lepers from cities and quarantine, extending the segregation rules of Lev 13/Num 5; they do not specifically reinterpret the day-seven shaving rite of Lev 14:9
Josephus
- Ant. 3.261-264 rationalized it Josephus summarizes the Levitical leprosy-purification legislation as part of his broader systematizing presentation of the priestly purity laws
The New Testament
- Mark 1:44 affirmed it Jesus instructs the healed leper to show himself to the priest and offer what Moses commanded, presupposing the Lev 14 purification framework
- Luke 17:14 affirmed it ten lepers sent to the priests for the purification process
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.
- ugaritic texts communal purification/atonement ritual involving bodily and cultic purification stages Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence KTU 1.40 Pardee, Ritual and Cult at Ugarit (2002)
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.