Literature. — Neander, Life of Christ ; Edersheim, Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah ; Godet, St. John ; Keim, Jesus of Nazara, vi. 253 ; Lipsius, de Cruce, ii. 14, iii. 14 ; Hastings' DB iii- 94a. \V. H. DUNDAS.
LEPROSY {Xe-n-pa, Mk 1^2^ Lk 512 ; and Xewpos, [leper] Mt 8^ lO* 11^ •26«, Mk V If, Lk 4^^ 7^^ IV").— The name of a disease common in Palestine in the time of Christ, for the cleansing of which many mighty works were performed. The great difficulty in knowing the exact nature of the disease from which the leper suffered lies in the fact that the word ' leprosy ' is used as the English equivalent of three different foreign words — the Heb. nynx (zurdcith), the Gr. \iirpa, and the Gr. i\e<f>as and i\€(pavTiaais. And the subject is further compli- cated by the fact that the term last mentioned, elephantiasis, is used to-day for a disease of quite another nature from that described under that name by the early Greek medical writers.
(1) nyijf [ziirdath) is the word tr. in EV ' leprosy' ; the root meaning is to smite. The symptoms of zdrdath are fully described in Lv 13, and we have other scattered references to the disease in the OT. To enter into a full examination of OT leprosy would be out of place here, but it may be said that neither true leprosy (in the modern sense) nor any other known disease answers to all the signs de- scribed. We must either suppose, as is conceivable but not higiily probable, that the disease described in Lv 13 has disappeared or greatly changed its character from new environment, or that the term zdrdath included a great variety of skin diseases, some infectious in the modern sense, but all of them regarded in ancient times as rendering their victims ceremonially impure. Of these diseases, to take a few examples, we seem to be able to recog- nize psoriasis in the expression ' a leper white as snow ' ; favus (a common disease among Eastern Jews to-day) and perhaps ' ringworm ' in the de- scription of the ' plague of the head and the beard ' (vv.^9-3") ; and the disease tntiligo in the symptom termed 'freckled spot' (pnii, v.^**), the exactly
equivalent word ^J^: (bohak) being used for this condition in Palestine and Arabia to-day. On the other hand, there are in the references to zdrdath an extraordinary absence of the symptoms of true leprosy which Avill be mentioned lower down ; the extremely slow process of this latter disease, and its practically hopeless outlook, ill tallies with either the frequent examinations — at intervals of seven days — or the elaborate directions, evidently meant for use, for restoration of a cured person to the community.
The history of medicine shows that in the un- developed state of medical science many diseases
which a later age learns to differentiate are classed as one disease ; of no department has this been truer than of diseases affecting the skin. In the Middle Ages many persons affected with syphilis were put in tlie lazar hospitals of Northern Europe througii the mistaken idea that they were lepers.
(2) Xeirpa (meaning 'rough' or 'scaly') was the name given by the Greek physicians to a disease known to-day as psoriasis. It is a non-contagious, irritating, but by no means fatal disease, in which white scales form on various parts of, and occa- sionally all over, the body. In such cases the ex- pression ' a leper white as snow ' might be not in- appropriate. The disease is not hereditary nor in any marked degree repulsive, unless, as is unusual, the face is attacked ; in this respect it is the very ojjposite of true leprosy, witii which, moreover, it cannot be confused.
In the LXX Kinpa, is used as the equivalent of zara'ath \ and as the former was well known, the translators apparently regarded this disease as the nearest equivalent to that described in the OT. In the same way the Sjnoptists, and among them Luke, the 'beloved physician,' in using Xi-r/ix and XiTpk, were using words which had a definite meaning to the outside world.
(3) True leprosy — the iXecpavTiao-Ls of the Greeks — is certainly no new disease, and references to it are found in Egyptian inscriptions many centuries before the Israelites left Egypt. It is also said that it was known in India at an equally primitive period. Hijipocrates appears to refer to it under the name of the ' Phojnician disease,' and Galen under the name 'elephantiasis.' It is stated by Pliny that it was brought to Europe from Syria by the army of Ptolemy (61 B.C.). From this time references to it are common, but always under the name elephantiasis.
It is evident, therefore, that at the time of the Gospels, \ewpa — in the classical medical sense — was primarily the well-known skin disease psoriasis. At the same time it is highly probable that the disease elephantiasis — true leprosy — together with other skin affections, e.g. vitiligo, favus, etc., were, from the point of view of ceremonial uncleanness, included in the term lepra, the word having, as is usual with medical terms, a much wider signifi- cation among the lay public tiian among the medi- cal authors. The fact that tradition has from the earliest period pointed to true leprosy as the disease of the Bible, certainly makes it probable that it at least was one of the diseases recognized by the Rabbis as zdrdath ; and doubtless its specially horrible and fatal character has caused it to gradu- ally displace all others in the popular mind.