Matthew Henry on Leviticus 13:47–end
This is the law concerning the plague of leprosy in a garment, whether linen or woollen. A leprosy in a garment, with discernible indications of it, the colour changed by it, the garment fretted, the nap worn off, and this in some one particular part of the garment, and increasing when it was shut up, and not to be got out by washing is a thing which to us now is altogether unaccountable. The learned confess that it was a sign and a miracle in Israel, an extraordinary punishment inflicted by the divine power, as a token of great displeasure against a person or family. 1. The process was much the same with that concerning a leprous person. The garment suspected to be tainted was not to be bur…
Read the whole note in the consoleJamieson-Fausset-Brown on Leviticus 13:47
The garment . . . that the . . . leprosy is in--It is well known that infectious diseases, such as scarlet fever, measles, the plague, are latently imbibed and carried by the clothes. But the language of this passage clearly indicates a disease to which clothes themselves were subject, and which was followed by effects on them analogous to those which malignant leprosy produces on the human body--for similar regulations were made for the rigid inspection of suspected garments by a priest as for the examination of a leprous person. It has long been conjectured and recently ascertained by the use of a lens, that the leprous condition of swine is produced by myriads of minute insects engendered…
Read the whole note in the consoleAdam Clarke on Leviticus 13:54
He shall shut it up seven days more - To give time for the spreading of the contagion, if it did exist there; that there might be the most unequivocal marks and proofs that the garment was or was not infected.
John Gill on Leviticus 13:56
And if the priest look, and, behold, the plague be somewhat dark after the washing of it,.... Is become of a weaker colour, either not quite so green, or not quite so red as it was, or is "contracted", and does not spread itself; see Gill on Leviticus 13:6; but is rather become less:
then he shall rend it out of the garment, or out of the skin, or out of the warp, or out of the woof; that is, that piece which has the plague in it, and burn it, as Jarchi says; that so the whole may not be lost, which is otherwise pure, and clean, and free from any infection. The manner of expression confirms what I have observed on Leviticus 13:48; that the warp and woof are considered as separate things, an…
