Nothing Left for It to Spread Into

About This Talk

Chapter 8 sets out the netek, the bare patch on the head or in the beard that must measure a square gris and must come by the hand of heaven, so that a bald place a person made on himself is pure, and it makes the patch impure through two short golden hairs or through spreading, with one week of isolation and then a second after the priest shaves around it leaving two hairs on every side, while black hair that grows inside the netek prevents impurity anywhere within it and even overturns a verdict already given, and black hair that merely remained saves only from the middle, so that two netakim divided by a line of black hair are impure when the line is broken once and pure when it is broken twice, and a netek that expands until the whole head is bare leaves the man pure by the verse that he is entirely bald. Chapter 9 rules that anyone at all may inspect a blemish except his own, that the declaration belongs to a priest and holds even from a priest who is a minor or incapable while a sage tells him what to say, that a priest who ruled wrongly has changed nothing and yet a healed man stays impure for years until a priest tells him he is pure, that only the priest who saw the blemish at the outset may rule that it spread, and that blemishes are seen only by day in the fourth, fifth, eighth and ninth hours, never indoors or under cloud or at noon and never on Shabbat or a festival, and only in what shows while a man stands as one hoeing and a woman sits as one kneading, without any search of the creases of the flesh. Chapter 10 forbids removing the signs at every stage though lashes follow only where the removal was effective, rules that removal before inspection or during isolation leaves the man pure while removal after a definitive ruling leaves him impure until the affliction covers his whole body, requires circumcision to proceed over a baheret on the foreskin, sets the metzora to cover his head and cloak himself to the lips like a mourner and announce his own impurity so that others can separate from him, and closes with the severity that he defiles a building he enters and the ground beneath a tree where he stands, so that a pure person who passes under it is defiled without any contact.