Fifty-nine verses of close observation: the colour of the hair in the mark, whether it looks deeper than the skin, whether raw flesh appears, whether it has spread after seven days and then another seven. All four translations call it leprosy, and it almost certainly is not — the identification came into English through the Septuagint’s lepra and the Vulgate. The text rules it out itself: tzaraat appears in wool and linen and leather, it appears in the walls of houses, and if it covers a person completely the priest pronounces him clean. No pathogen does that. And the person doing the examining is a priest, not a physician; there is no treatment anywhere in the chapter, only a verdict.