The garment: This leprosy in garments appears so strange to us, that it has induced some, with Bp. Patrick, to consider it as an extraordinary punishment inflicted by God upon the Israelites, as a sign of his high displeasure; while others consider the leprosy in clothes (and also houses) as having no relation to the leprosy in man.
When Michaelis was considering the subject, he was told by a dealer in wool, that the wool of sheep which die of a disease, if it has not been shorn from the animal while living, is unfit to manufacture cloth, and liable to something like what Moses here describes, and which he imagines to be the plague of leprosy in garments.
The whole account, however, as Dr. A. Clarke observes, seems to intimate that the garment was fretted by the contagion of the real leprosy; which it is probable was occasioned by a species of animacula:, or vermin, burrowing in the skin, which we know to be the cause of the itch; these, by breeding in the garments, must necessarily multiply their kind, and fret the garments, i.
e., corrode a portion of the finer parts, after the manner of moths, for their nourishment. The infection of garments has frequently been known to cause the worst species of scarlet fever, and even the plague; and those infected with psora:, or itch animal, have communicated the disease even in six or seven years after the infection.