A SCALY DISEASE — traditionally ‘leprosy’, and the tradition is where the trouble starts. Around the 2nd century BC the Septuagint rendered tzaraat with Greek lepros, ‘scaly’ — an honest choice for its day, since true Hansen’s disease (Mycobacterium leprae) went by a wholly different Greek name, elephantiasis; ancient medicine kept the two apart. The narrowing happened later, in Latin and then in English, as ‘leprosy’ hardened into the name of one specific disease and no other — so a modern reader meets the King James’s word and imports a diagnosis the Hebrew never makes. ⚠ Leviticus 13 diagnoses tzaraat by depth, spreading and hair colour, and legislates the identical word for wool, leather, and (Leviticus 14, now on these pages) a house wall — none of which a bacterial skin infection can do. This translation reads ‘a scaly disease’ throughout rather than ‘leprosy’, following NIV’s ‘defiling skin disease’ and Spanish NVI’s ‘infección’ off the traditional word; NWT keeps ‘the disease of leprosy’ even here — one of the rare places this shelf’s most exacting version does not correct the tradition. See also the Greek-side entry lepros, written when Matthew 8 first met the word. ⚠ Its next appearance in the Torah’s own narrative order strikes Miriam (Numbers 12:10, already on these pages) directly after she speaks against Moses — almost certainly why the later lashon hara reading exists at all. The clause used of her, metzora’at ka-shaleg, ‘scaly-diseased as snow’, is word for word the clause used of Moses’ own hand at Exodus 4:6 (already on these pages), where it is a sign granted on request and reversed in the next verse — the same three words, once as a credential and once as a sentence. → first discussed at Lev 13:2