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Summary
- Pink is not in the Bible. Neither Hebrew nor Greek has a word for it, and English only used “pink” for the colour from the seventeenth century.
- Biblical colour words mostly name dyes and materials rather than points on a spectrum — the blue is tekhelet, and the crimson is tola’at shani.
- That crimson is named after a worm: the dye came from the kermes insect, crushed to produce a deep red used across the ancient Mediterranean.
- Isaiah 1:18 uses two dye words. These were fast dyes that did not wash out, which is the force of the promise — a stain that by definition does not come out is going to come out.
- Scripture gives no colour code. Where it specifies colours it is specifying materials for a building, and the reason is cost.
Bibliography (Click to show)
Sources: Scripture quotations from the NIV via BibleGateway (Isaiah 1:18; Exodus 25-28 for the tabernacle materials; Joshua 2:18). The identification of tola’at shani with a kermes insect dye, and the small colour vocabulary of biblical Hebrew, are standard in lexicons and in the literature on ancient dyes. The English word “pink” for the colour dates from the seventeenth century, from the flower.
