What Does Exodus 4:6 Mean?

Again the LORD said to him, "Put your hand inside your cloak." And he put his hand inside his cloak, and when he took it out, behold, his hand was leprous like snow. The second sign is the most corporeal of the three: Moses' own hand becomes diseased. Leprosy (Hebrew: tzara'at; the term covers various skin conditions in the biblical text, not necessarily what modern medicine calls leprosy) made a person ritually unclean and excluded from the covenant community. For Moses to put a clean hand into a garment and withdraw it white as snow is a dramatic sign: the hidden interior of the garment has become a place of divine transformation.

The leprosy sign is particularly resonant in the context of Moses' credentials before Israel: the man who claims divine appointment demonstrates that he can produce the conditions of ritual exclusion and reverse them. This is power over the conditions that separate human beings from the covenant community, power over the bodily states that exclude. Numbers 12:10 records that when Miriam is struck with leprosy after opposing Moses, the condition is reversed through Moses' prayer: the one whose hand became leprous and was healed has ongoing authority over the condition that threatened his credibility in verse 1.

The juxtaposition of the two signs, the staff becoming a Serpent (external transformation of an object) and the hand becoming leprous (internal transformation of Moses' own body), covers two domains: what Moses holds and what Moses is. God is demonstrating his authority over both the environment and the person. The staff represents the external world Moses navigates; the hand represents his own physical being. When both domains respond to divine command, the range of God's power encompassed in this commissioning is complete.