The Hair That Belongs to a Blemish That Is Gone

About This Talk

Chapter 2 sets out the first sign of tzara'at, requiring no fewer than two white hairs long enough to be pulled out by tweezers, ruling that a hair white at the base and dark at the tip defiles while the reverse is pure, that any shade of whiteness suffices since the hairs appear white, that hairs standing in a boil, burnt flesh or a bohak inside the blemish are no sign at all, and above all that the baheret must have preceded the whitening, inferred from the phrase that it turned hair to white, so that hair whitened by an earlier blemish which has since vanished is called entrusted hair and cannot serve a later blemish that returns to the same place. Chapter 3 turns to healthy flesh, which must be a lentil in size when squared, must sit in the center with the blemish surrounding it and a margin of two hairs to the edge, may be any color at all, and is a sign whether it came before the blemish or after, because Scripture uses no verb of causation about it, and then rules that where the baheret is exactly a gris and the healthy flesh exactly a lentil, growth of the healthy flesh renders the person pure, since the margin that made the sign legible has been swallowed, and that at the 24 rounded tips of the limbs healthy flesh conveys nothing because the priest cannot see the blemish as a single entity. Chapter 4 governs the increase, which must spread outward rather than within itself, must not run into a boil or burnt flesh or the head or the beard, and above all counts only after isolation, so that a priest who watches a blemish spreading at a first examination isolates for a week rather than ruling, and it closes by making the three signs interchangeable for keeping a man impure while insisting that he is not pure until no sign remains upon him, neither the one he was condemned for nor any other.