Leviticus 13:13

13. All turned white: he is clean Here is a paradox; the partial leper is unclean, the total leper is clean. The explanation of Patrick is, that this uniform white covering is indicative of some other disease, and not the real leprosy, yet it has so strong a resemblance as to prompt the writer to give it the same name. But the more common theory is, that the crisis of the leprosy is reached when the patient becomes white from head to foot “broken out blooming on the skin,” with an enamelled, hard, dry scurf, incapable of communicating the contagion by contact. Canon Cook argues that the disease treated of in this chapter is the elephantiasis, and not the leprosy, and that when the entire surface turns white it indicates that it is not the elephantiasis, but some other disease, which did not render the man unclean. This solution of the difficulty agrees very nearly with Patrick’s. It is a prevalent opinion that the leprosy is here treated, not on sanitary but wholly on ceremonial grounds, and that the leprosy is arbitrarily pronounced unclean, just as a corpse is unclean a moment after life is extinct, and that the ceremonial pollution, by arbitrary appointment, continues only so long as the disease is spreading.