Tzara’at on Homes
Fourth Reading (Sixth when combined)
33 God spoke to Moses, instructing him to convey His words to Aaron, for him to say in turn to the Israelites in God’s name,
34 “When you enter Canaan, which I am giving you as a possession, you will dispossess the nations who presently occupy the land and be able to inhabit the homes they inhabit now. Of these nations, the Amorites in particular are fully aware of God’s promise to Abraham that you will dispossess them.
But since, in that very promise, God stated that their dispossession will be a punishment for their sins, they also cherish the hope that God will likewise someday punish you for your sins and exile you from the land, at which time they will be free to repossess it and move back into their homes. Thus, some of them have been stashing their gold in the walls of their houses ever since you left Egypt.
Therefore, do not fret when I place a tzara’at-lesion upon a house in the land of your possession, for even if, on that account, you are forced to demolish your house, you will thereby reveal these hidden treasures and gain considerable wealth.
35 When a lesion appears on a house, the owner of the house must come and tell the priest about it, saying, ‘Something resembling a lesion has appeared on my house.’ Even if the owner is familiar with the signs of tzara’at and is sure that the lesion is tzara’at, he must not state this fact decisively; rather, he must leave that to the priest.
36 The priest must order that the house be cleared out before he, the priest, comes inside to examine the lesion, so that everything in the house not become ritually defiled if he indeed pronounces the lesion to be tzara’at, for even if the lesion is tzara’at, nothing in the house becomes defiled until the priest pronounces it to be so. True, the wooden or metal utensils in the house can later be purified of ritual defilement by immersing them in a mikveh, and the food in the house can be consumed by someone who happens to be defiled at the time. However, as you know, earthenware vessels cannot be purified of ritual defilement by immersion, so once these become ritually defiled, they may never again be used for ritually undefiled food. It is therefore for the sake of these vessels that the house must be emptied out.
The repercussions of the ritual defilement contracted by a house afflicted with tzara’at or quarantined for suspected tzara’at are the same as those for the ritual defilement of a man who has suffered two or more discrete non-seminal discharges (which will be discussed in detail later).
After this, the priest must come to examine the house.
37 He must examine the lesion. If the lesion on the walls of the house (a) appears on the stones of the walls, (b) covers at least an area equivalent to a rectangle two of whose sides are equal to the diameter of a Cilician bean and whose two other sides are equal to twice the diameter of a Cilician bean [308 mm or 0.48 in], and (c) consists of pure green or pure red sunken-looking stains (or stains of a mixture of both colors), appearing to be deeper than the wall,
