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Summary
- The Bible mentions grey only as the colour of hair: the King James Version has “gray”, “grey”, “grayheaded” or “greyheaded” in nine verses, all about growing old.
- Most of them translate one Hebrew word, seybah, “hoary head, old age”, which once describes the white wake of Leviathan on the sea.
- Grey hair is honoured in Scripture when it crowns a life lived with God, and Jacob and Hosea show its sorrow and its warning too.
- There is no grey horse in the King James Version, though some modern Bibles call Zechariah’s “grisled” horses dappled gray and Revelation’s pale horse ashen.
- The Bible never calls ashes grey, and the idea of grey as a moral “grey area” is a modern reflection, not a meaning Scripture gives.
- In Spanish Bibles, “la grey de Dios” means the flock of God, as in “Apacentad la grey de Dios” in 1 Peter 5:2; the words for grey hair there are “canas”.
- God promises to carry his people to the end: “even to hoar hairs will I carry you.”
Bibliography (Click to show)
- The Holy Bible, King James Version (public domain), quoted from BibleGateway: Genesis 3:19; 31:10; 42:38; 44:18, 29, 31; Leviticus 19:32; Deuteronomy 32:25; 1 Samuel 12:2; Job 15:1, 10; 41:32; 42:6; Psalm 71:9, 18; 92:14; Proverbs 16:31; 20:29; Isaiah 40:11; 46:3–4; Daniel 9:3; Hosea 7:8–9; Zechariah 6:3; 1 Peter 5:1–4 (5:3 “ensamples” as in the standard King James text, Project Gutenberg eBook 10); Revelation 3:14–16; 6:8.
- Word counts: the King James Version text of Project Gutenberg eBook 10, searched for the whole words “gray”, “grey”, “grayheaded”, “greyheaded”, “hoary” and “hoar”.
- Reina-Valera 1960 (© Sociedades Bíblicas en América Latina, 1960; renewed © Sociedades Bíblicas Unidas, 1988): Génesis 42:38, Salmos 71:18, 1 Pedro 5:2–3 and a search for “grey”, BibleGateway.
- New International Version and New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NRSVUE), Zechariah 6:3; New American Standard Bible (1995), Leviticus 19:32 and Job 41:32; NASB 1995 and NRSVUE, Revelation 6:8; Louis Segond 1910, Genesis 42:38 and Proverbs 20:29; via BibleGateway.
- Strong’s Hebrew 7872 seybah, with Brown-Driver-Briggs and the NAS Exhaustive Concordance, Bible Hub; Strong’s Hebrew 7867 sib, Bible Hub; Strong’s Hebrew 1261 barod, Bible Hub; Strong’s Greek 5515 chloros, with Thayer’s lexicon, Bible Hub.
- Real Academia Española and ASALE, Diccionario de la lengua española, “grey”, dle.rae.es.
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