What Does Leviticus 14:54 Mean?
This is the instruction for every kind of stroke of the skin, and for the crust.
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.
King James wording
King James Version
This is the law for all manner of plague of leprosy, and scall,THE KEY
The word translated “plague” is nega, a striking or touch, so affliction carries the image of something that has made contact.
THE MEANING
When affliction needs to be recognized, this verse brings distinct conditions under instruction rather than leaving them as one unnamed blur. Naming and discernment belong to facing what is present.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie that every visible affliction is the same condition: this verse names different forms distinctly.
THE ROOT
נֶגַע
negaʿ
GROWS FROM
נגע
n-g-ʿ
To touch, reach, or strike.
“stroke of the skin” in this verse is negaʿ. Nega names an affliction as a striking or contact, carrying a bodily image inside the word. The same root can describe what touches and what is stricken, joining the condition to the experience of being struck.
ALSO GROWS
nāgaʿ: to touch, reach, or strike
נָגַע
The noun nega retains the root’s sense of something making contact.
nāgûaʿ: stricken, afflicted
נָגוּעַ
This form describes someone as stricken, echoing the root behind the verse’s word “plague.”
THE PATTERN
The root נגע names affliction as something that touches or strikes, whether it appears as a condition, a sore, or a person described as stricken.
When a man has in the skin of his flesh a lifting, a scab, or a shining spot, and it is in the skin of his flesh like the stroke of the striking; then he shall be brought to Aaron the priest, or to one of his sons the priests;My lovers and my friends stand back from my stroke, and my nearest stand far off.Surely he has borne our sicknesses, and carried our wounds. Yet we reckoned him struck, beaten by God, and bowed low.THE THREAD
Surely he has borne our sicknesses, and carried our wounds. Yet we reckoned him struck, beaten by God, and bowed low.The Hebrew word translated “stricken” shares the root נגע with Leviticus’s “plague.” The root links a named affliction with the person described as having been struck.
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