According to Exodus 4, what happened to Moses’s hand when he put it inside his cloak?
Answer
It became leprous
According to Exodus 4, Moses’s hand became leprous when he put it inside his cloak.
This was the second sign God gave Moses to demonstrate to the Israelites that God had appeared to him and commissioned him to lead them out of Egypt. When Moses removed his hand, the biblical account says it was restored, becoming like the rest of his flesh. The sign followed the transformation of Moses’s staff into a snake.
In the biblical narrative, these signs address Moses’s concern that the Israelites might not believe him. Exodus later describes additional signs involving water from the Nile. The episode is sometimes confused with the skin disease associated with other biblical figures, but here the condition is a temporary sign and is immediately healed. The wording describes the hand as affected by “leprosy” in many English translations, although the ancient Hebrew term does not map perfectly onto modern medical definitions.