Posted on 09/19/2018 7:00:22 AM PDT by marshmallow
Forty-nine times the Bible mentions a perfect, pure blue, a color so magnificent and transcendent that it was all but impossible to describe.
Yet, for most of the last 2,000 years, nobody has known exactly what biblical blue called tekhelet in Hebrew actually looked like or how it could be re-created.
At the time of the Second Temple, which towered above Jerusalem until it was destroyed by the Romans, a blue dye of the same name was used to color the fabric used in the clothing of the high priests. Jewish men are still commanded to use a tekhelet-tinted thread in the knotted fringes of their prayer shawls, though what that might look like remained unclear for years.
Maimonides, the medieval Sephardic philosopher, described tekhelet as being the color of the clear noonday sky.
Rashi, the 11th century French rabbi and scholar, said it was the color of the evening sky.
Tekhelet was the most prized color you could attain, says Amanda Weiss, director of Jerusalems Bible Lands Museum.
A possible clue to the ingredients that combined to make tekhelet came from the Talmud, the canonical body of rabbinic texts, in which a man named Abaye asked an elder this thread of tekhelet, how do you dye it? He was told that the blood of the snail and chemicals (apparently caustic soda or sodium carbonate) had to be boiled together to create the dye.
It was not much to go on.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Thank you for the links.
Very interesting.
:)
I researched and presented a whole class on techeyles once. Of course you probably know that there is an orthodox, though minority, opinion that the correct crustacean has been found and the blue dyed tzitzis can be seen again.
And Sunken Civ’s article is the murex snail, I believe. What the modern researchers found is that exposing the blood (or bile) mixture of the snail to sunlight for longer times made it shift from reddish purple to the beautiful blue seen in the link.
They also raise sheep as a source of wool for the fringes. Visitors can pet the sheep as well as take a turn turning the loom handle to produce the string. Here is the webpage for the factory, with a fascinating account of the history of the rediscovery of the source of this color:
My pleasure.
“All that law stuff in the old testament is the equivalent of the laws of the US. It is the law crated for a theocracy”
Sorry, but you couldn’t be more wrong if you tried.
The law was given to set apart(sanctify) Israel and to show us what sin looks like. In the perfect sense it was set to lead us to Jesus Christ. U.S. law was crated with the Law of Moses as the example for a moral God fearing people.
Yes, but some credit must be given to the Greeks.
When asked once what was the philosophy underlying the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson replied that: All its authority rests on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c.
John Adams similarly wrote that the principles of the American Revolution are the principles of Aristotle and Plato, of Livy and Cicero, and Sidney, Harrington, and Locke; the principles of nature and eternal reason; the principles on which the whole government over us now stands.
We are actually in agreement. My comment was, looking back, way too broad.
Topic posted 9/19/2018, thanks marshmallow.
Laws change. Times change. Jesus’s messages are timeless.
ping
Maybe, but I think it's very hard to beat hauyne or lazurite. I've never seen crystallized plancheite but hauyne to me is the most amazing blue I've seen. Also cornflower blue sapphire and the full blue palette of corundum can be breathtaking.
It looks like when I made it. ;)
On the way to work this morning, I saw a kid with a purple mohawk and a skateboard waiting to cross at an intersection. Should I have done obeisance?...............
Nice job using obeisance in a sentence about a kid with a purple mohawk! ;^D
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