a tattoo mark: a lasting mark pricked into the skin.
This word appears exactly once in the whole Old Testament, in a short law in Leviticus that forbids putting a tattoo mark on yourself. It is built from the everyday Hebrew verb for writing (כָּתַב), and its form names the thing produced rather than the act, so it is an inscription rather than an act of inscribing. But the inscription here is not on clay or leather. It is on a body.
What makes the sense clear is the second rare word the law pairs it with (קַעֲקַע), a term pointing to piercing or wounding. Ancient readers took the pairing to describe writing made by pricking: the old Greek translation calls it "pricked letters," the Syriac version speaks of "dots," and early Jewish law held a person responsible only when both things had happened, the puncturing and the coloring. Behind all of this lies an older and more physical layer in the root itself, which once meant something like piercing or stitching through with a sharp point, a sense that in Hebrew survives here and almost nowhere else.
What the verse does not say is why the mark is forbidden, and that silence is where scholars part company:
- Some read it together with the mourning customs named all around it, where grieving people cut their own skin for the dead.
- Others answer that no ancient text outside the Bible describes tattooing as a mourning practice, and that the matching law for priests bans gashing and shaving but never this.
- On their reading the mark is a badge of ownership, the sort of name a master or a temple pricked into the hand of a slave, which a people just freed from slavery must never wear again.
- A few ground the ban instead in respect for a body made in God's image and not to be disfigured.
Elsewhere the Bible is not squeamish about a mark that shows whose you are. A protective sign guards Cain (אוֹת), a mark on the forehead spares the faithful in Ezekiel's vision (תָּו), and Isaiah pictures a returning exile writing on his own hand that he belongs to the LORD. Whatever this one law was aimed at, it was not the idea of a marked body as such.
Why Leviticus 19:28 forbids the mark, given that the verse states no reason.
- contestedIt is one more mortuary self-marking rite, of a piece with the gashing for the dead in the first half of the verse and with the wider cult of the dead addressed in Leviticus 19:26-31.; Karl Elliger, Leviticus (HAT 4; Tübingen: Mohr, 1966), 262-263; Erhard S. Gerstenberger, Leviticus: A Commentary (OTL; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996), 252-253; Saul M. Olyan, Biblical Mourning: Ritual and Social Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 111-116
- contestedIt is an independent prohibition against bearing the ownership mark of a human master or a deity, on the grounds that the parallel priestly law in Leviticus 21:5 omits tattooing, that no Ancient Near Eastern mourning text attests it, and that the surviving evidence links tattoo and brand with servitude and temple dedication.; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17-22 (Anchor Yale Bible 3A; New York: Doubleday, 2000), 1693-1699; John Huehnergard and Harold Liebowitz, "The Biblical Prohibition Against Tattooing," Vetus Testamentum 63 (2013): 59-77; Sandra Jacobs, The Body as Property: Physical Disfigurement in Biblical Law (LHBOTS 582; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014)
- minorityIt belongs to a body-integrity program grounded in creation: Israel must not deface the divine likeness, alongside Leviticus 19:19, Leviticus 21:17-23 and Deuteronomy 14:1-2.; Gordon J. Wenham, The Book of Leviticus (NICOT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), 272
- contestedThe rationale is simply not specified; the clause may or may not be tied to mourning, and the evidence does not settle it.; Jay Sklar, Leviticus (TOTC; Downers Grove: IVP, 2013), 250; John E. Hartley, Leviticus (WBC 4; Dallas: Word, 1992), 305-306
Disputed
What kind of skin mark the noun denotes: an inscription made by pricking and pigmenting, a brand, or possibly nothing more specific than a decoration.
- majorityA permanent inscription produced by puncturing the skin and working a pigment into it, the technique the ancient versions and the tannaitic sources describe.; BDB, 508, s.v. כְּתֹבֶת; DCH (Clines), vol. 4, 512, s.v. כְּתֹבֶת; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17-22 (Anchor Yale Bible 3A; New York: Doubleday, 2000), 1693-1695; Mishnah Makkot 3:6
- minorityBranding remains a live referent, since the second element of the phrase is plausibly derived from יקע, cognate with Arabic waqqaʿa "to wound, to brand a horse."; John Huehnergard and Harold Liebowitz, "The Biblical Prohibition Against Tattooing," Vetus Testamentum 63 (2013): 59-77, at 70; Gilad Gevaryahu, "Ketovet Kaʿaka: Tattooing or Branding?," Jewish Bible Quarterly 38 (2010): 13-22
- minorityThe precise sense of the phrase cannot be recovered from a single attestation, and a simple decoration cannot be excluded.; HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner, ed. Richardson), vol. II, 505