What Does Blue Mean in the Bible? Holiness and Remembering God

Blue is the color of God’s holy place. The curtains of the tabernacle, its veil and the high priest’s robe were made with it, and every Israelite was told to wear a blue cord on the tassels of his clothes, “that ye may look upon it, and remember all the commandments of the LORD” (Numbers 15:39).

That is the one meaning Scripture spells out. The high priest went before God in a robe all of blue. The farmer and the shepherd were to wear a single thread of the same color at the corner of a cloak. What filled the sanctuary was sewn onto the hem of every garment, so that God’s people carried a little of his house wherever they walked, and remembered whose they were.

What is the Hebrew word for blue in the Bible?

The word is tekhelet. The Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon counts it 48 times and defines it as “violet, i.e. violet thread and stuff”: a deep blue-violet wool rather than a shade on a paint card. The King James Version translates it “blue”, and most of the Bible’s blue is in Exodus, where the tabernacle is built. Strong’s dictionary traces the color to “the cerulean mussel”: it was a dye from a creature of the sea, costly and hard to make. How the source of that dye was lost for centuries, and searched for again, is told in the story of the Bible’s lost blue.

So when readers ask about navy blue, sky blue or light blue in the Bible, the honest answer is that Scripture does not sort blue into shades. It names one blue, the blue of the sanctuary, and it names it by the thread.

Where does blue appear in the Bible?

Almost always in the house of God. Among the gifts Israel brought for the tabernacle were “blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine linen” (Exodus 25:4). The ten curtains of the tent were woven “of fine twined linen, and blue, and purple, and scarlet: with cherubims” (Exodus 26:1), and so was the veil that hid the Most Holy Place (Exodus 26:31). When Solomon built the temple, he sent for a craftsman skilled “in purple, and crimson, and blue” (2 Chronicles 2:7), and “he made the vail of blue, and purple, and crimson, and fine linen, and wrought cherubims thereon” (2 Chronicles 3:14).

The high priest wore it most of all. “Thou shalt make the robe of the ephod all of blue,” God tells Moses (Exodus 28:31). Around its hem hung pomegranates of blue, purple and scarlet, with golden bells between them, “and his sound shall be heard when he goeth in unto the holy place before the LORD” (Exodus 28:33–35). On his forehead was a plate of pure gold engraved HOLINESS TO THE LORD, and it was held there by blue: “thou shalt put it on a blue lace, that it may be upon the mitre” (Exodus 28:36–37). The words that named God’s holiness were tied to the priest with a blue cord.

Blue also went with the ark on the road. When the camp moved, the priests covered the ark with the veil and with skins, “and shall spread over it a cloth wholly of blue” (Numbers 4:6). As Israel crossed the wilderness, the most holy thing among them travelled under blue.

Why did God command a blue thread on the tassels?

God tells us himself. “Speak unto the children of Israel, and bid them that they make them fringes in the borders of their garments throughout their generations, and that they put upon the fringe of the borders a ribband of blue: And it shall be unto you for a fringe, that ye may look upon it, and remember all the commandments of the LORD, and do them” (Numbers 15:38–39). The reason goes on: “That ye may remember, and do all my commandments, and be holy unto your God. I am the LORD your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt” (15:40–41).

Look, remember, do. The blue thread was given because God’s people forget, and so do we. A people who had seen the sea split could still let their eyes wander, and God gave their eyes something to come back to: a thread at the corner of the cloak, the color of the curtain before his presence.

The Jewish sages kept turning this thread over. One teaching in the Talmud says that “looking at the ritual fringes leads to remembering the mitzvot, and remembering them leads to doing them” (Menachot 43b). The morning Shema could be said “from when one can distinguish between the sky-blue strings and the white strings” of the fringes, so the blue thread marked the first light of day for prayer. And Rabbi Meir asked why this color was chosen above all others: “tekhelet is similar in its color to the sea, and the sea is similar to the sky, and the sky is similar to the Throne of Glory.” The thread on the hem points up, step by step, to the throne of God.

Does blue represent heaven in the Bible?

Scripture never says so in those words, but it comes close twice. At Sinai, Moses, Aaron and seventy elders “saw the God of Israel: and there was under his feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone, and as it were the body of heaven in his clearness” (Exodus 24:10). Centuries later, in exile, Ezekiel saw above the living creatures “the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone” (Ezekiel 1:26; also 10:1). The Hebrew word is sappir, which Brown-Driver-Briggs gives as sapphire, “perhaps also lapis lazuli”, the deep blue stone of the ancient world; the New American Standard Bible translates it lapis lazuli. Both visions put that blue stone at God’s feet and under his throne, and Exodus compares it with the sky itself.

Rabbi Meir’s chain ends here: after the sea and the sky, he quotes these two verses as his proof that the sky is like the throne. The Jewish historian Josephus, writing in the first century, read the sanctuary another way, as a picture of the whole universe. The four materials of the veils stood for the four elements: the linen for the earth, the purple for the sea, the scarlet for fire, and “the blue is fit to signify the air”. Of the high priest’s robe he says “the blue denoted the sky” (Antiquities 3.7.7). He too tied blue to the sky. These are readings by Jewish teachers of old, and we can receive them gratefully. The Bible’s own word about blue stays the plainer one in Numbers: look, and remember.

At the end of the Bible, the blue stone is still there. The second foundation of the wall of the new Jerusalem is “sapphire” (Revelation 21:19). The stone that once lay under God’s feet on a mountain becomes a foundation of the holy city.

Is blue a royal color in the Bible?

Blue dye was precious, so it also dressed the powerful. In the Persian palace at Shushan the hangings were “white, green, and blue” (Esther 1:6). Ezekiel describes the Assyrian officers “clothed with blue, captains and rulers” (Ezekiel 23:6), and when Ezekiel pictures the trading city of Tyre as a great ship, he says to her, “blue and purple from the isles of Elishah was that which covered thee” (Ezekiel 27:7). When Mordecai was raised to honor at the Persian court, he “went out from the presence of the king in royal apparel of blue and white, and with a great crown of gold” (Esther 8:15), “and the city of Shushan rejoiced and was glad.”

The same cloth could be misused. Jeremiah mocks the idols of the nations, covered in silver and gold: “blue and purple is their clothing: they are all the work of cunning men” (Jeremiah 10:9). Blue was never holy in itself. It was holy where God put it, in his house and on the hem of his people, for remembering him.

Why is Mary shown in blue?

The Bible does not say what Mary wore. Her blue mantle comes from Christian art, and mostly from Western painting. Painters made their finest blue, ultramarine, from lapis lazuli mined in Afghanistan, and, as London’s National Gallery explains, “the very best grades could be worth more than gold.” That is why, in the Gallery’s words, “Mary’s robes were often painted in rich ultramarine to signify her sacred status.” The Gallery adds that patrons who ordered a painting “would often pay for the exact amount of ultramarine pigment they wanted used”, so the blue on Mary’s robe was costly and chosen with care. It is fitting all the same that their costliest blue came from lapis lazuli, the stone that may be the sapphire Moses and Ezekiel saw beneath the throne of God.

Is blue mentioned in the New Testament?

Once, in a vision of judgment. In Revelation 9:17 the riders wear “breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone”. The Greek word is hyakinthinos, which Strong’s defines as “deep blue”; the New International Version renders it “dark blue”, and the English Standard Version “sapphire”. The thread of Numbers is in the Gospels too, under another name. In Matthew’s Gospel, “a woman, which was diseased with an issue of blood twelve years, came behind him, and touched the hem of his garment: For she said within herself, If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole” (Matthew 9:20–21). The Greek word for that hem is kraspedon, which Thayer’s lexicon explains is used in the New Testament for the Hebrew tsitsit, the fringe that Numbers commanded. Jesus wore the fringes of the Law, and later the sick “besought him that they might only touch the hem of his garment: and as many as touched were made perfectly whole” (Matthew 14:36). What Jesus warned against was wearing them to be admired, as those did who “make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments” (Matthew 23:5).

Think of what that woman reached for. The fringe was given so that Israel would look at it and remember God. She reached for it believing that one touch of the man who wore it would make her whole. And he turned round to her. “Daughter, be of good comfort; thy faith hath made thee whole” (Matthew 9:22).

Related reading

• Indigo Is Not in the Bible — but Its Blue Was Lost for Centuries
• What Was the Tabernacle in the Bible? Israel’s Tent Sanctuary, Its Layout and Meaning
• What Purple Means in the Bible: It Means Money
• Is Scarlet in the Bible? Yes, as a Color, but Not as a Name
• What Does the Color White Mean in Scripture?