What Does Leviticus 13:57 Mean?

And if it still appears in the garment, either in the warp, or in the weft, or in anything of skin; it is a spreading stroke; you shall burn with fire the thing in which the stroke is.

Leviticus 13:57 · SDV

Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.

Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.

This verse in the King James

King James wording

King James Version

And if it appear still in the garment, either in the warp, or in the woof, or in any thing of skin; it is a spreading plague: thou shalt burn that wherein the plague is with fire.

THE KEY

The Hebrew word translated “spreading” also means “blossoming”: the same root can describe a desert in bloom or a boil breaking out.

THE MEANING

When the mark keeps breaking out through the garment, warp, woof, or leather, it is no longer treated as an isolated stain. The response is stark and complete: the item carrying the outbreak is burned.

WHAT THIS UNDOES

This undoes the assumption that a persistent mark is only a local blemish: here, continued outbreak changes the judgment and the response reaches its carrier.

THE ROOT

פֹּרַחַת

porachat

GROWS FROM

פרח

To sprout, blossom, or break out.

Hebrew pictures the “spreading” as a kind of blossoming: something breaks outward through the weave. The same root names a desert coming into bloom and a boil breaking out, so the root describes emergence; the surrounding context shows whether it flourishes or harms.

ALSO GROWS

perach: Blossom, flower.

פֶּרַח

This noun carries the image of flowering inside the word translated “spreading.”

poreach: Breaking out; used of the boil in Exodus 9:9.

פֹּרֵחַ

The same root describes a boil breaking out, revealing its sense of eruption as well as bloom.

yifrach: Shall blossom; used in Isaiah 35:1.

יִפְרָח

The root also describes the desert blossoming, showing the flourishing side of the same outward emergence.

THE PATTERN

Once an outbreak enters its medium, its effects can reach the whole field it occupies.

And it shall become fine dust over all the land of Egypt, and shall be a boil breaking forth in blisters upon man, and upon beast, throughout all the land of Egypt.

Exodus 9:9 · SDVThe boil is described as breaking out across the land, giving the same eruption image a bodily form.

Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?

1 Corinthians 5:6 · SDVA small amount of leaven works through the whole lump, showing how an influence moves through its medium.

And the tongue is fire, a world of crookedness. It is set among our limbs, staining the whole body and setting the wheel of becoming ablaze, and it is lit by Gehenna.

James 3:6 · SDVA fire beginning with the tongue is pictured reaching the whole body and the course of life.

THE THREAD

The wilderness and the parched place rejoice, and the desert plain leaps and blooms like the crocus.

Isaiah 35:1 · SDV

Leviticus calls the outbreak ⁨פֹּרַחַת⁩, from the same root used when Isaiah says the desert shall “blossom.” The word names emergence itself: here it breaks out through cloth; there it flowers across the wilderness.

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