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 Jerusalem’s 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 ...
Wonder if this was Lydia’s “purple” in Acts.
Douglas Adams wrote about “The Hooloovoo”
A super-intelligent shade of the color blue.
An orthodox jew I worked with in the mid-90’s told me about this. They had a blue thread in their “apron”, but the snail went extinct so, what to do. They voted on whether to find some other source to have a blue thread, or just go without. They voted to go without.
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 - A theocracy that no longer exists. That is why so much of it, regarding food, etc, is so similar - yet intentionally different in some ways - to cultures contemporaneous with theirs.
Somebody did some major color changes on the Tut mask to match with the other blue objects....sheesh.
I remember reading many years ago a theory suggesting that we couldn’t see the color blue until relatively late in our development:
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/what-is-blue-and-how-do-we-see-color-2015-2
I knew that there had to be a book review or a traveling museum piece somewhere to get a reporter to look at this.
And now I want to see the exhibit myself. So it worked.
Nice videos, and looks well worth stopping by when in Israel.
ping
Thanks for sharing! Very interesting!
Wasn’t that the Pantone color of the year 2008?
A form of colbalt blue?
This is an interesting article.
https://www.quora.com/How-come-the-color-blue-doesnt-naturally-occur-in-nature
A form of colbalt blue, but a little bit lighter.
That’s closer to what I saw at NYC Metropolitan Museum, the first stop of the King TuT tour. Somewhere I have the exhibit catalogue and a very large poster of the mask. Outstanding exhibit!
Yet in the USA, there is a plant called the indigo flower which produces a blue color.
LOL! (I miss those guys.)
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