Dreaming About Washing Hair: The Bible Gives It No Meaning

Biblical Dream InterpretationSee all 70 articles in this series

Scripture records no dream of washing hair, and gives it no meaning. But hair and washing meet twice in the Gospels, and both times the scene is so intimate that the room goes quiet around it.

It does not. Scripture records many dreams and interprets only a handful, and every one of those meanings is given directly by God, through a named servant, for one person, about one matter. No verse assigns a sense to hair, or to washing, or to anything else seen at night.

Washing in Scripture is deeply meaningful while we are awake. That is where we should go.

Our Lord is at dinner in a Pharisee’s house. A woman comes in — the text says only that she had lived a sinful life, and everyone at that table knew exactly what was meant.

As she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them.

She had brought perfume. She had not brought a towel. So she used what she had.

Let us not rush past this. A woman’s loosened hair in that culture was not a public thing; to unbind it in a room full of men was to abandon her dignity entirely. And her host is meanwhile doing the arithmetic on what kind of prophet would let such a woman touch him.

Jesus turns to the host and points out, quite mildly, that nobody washed his feet when he came in.

And on the last night, he takes the role himself. He gets up from supper, wraps a towel round his waist, and washes the feet of twelve men — including the one who has already decided to sell him.

Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet.

Between those two scenes, the whole logic of Christian washing sits. It is never about hygiene. It is about someone kneeling in front of someone else and taking the dirt into their hands.

Two things, and we should hold them together.

It means being made clean, and the agent is always God. Wash me, and I will be whiter than snow. He saved us through the washing of rebirth. We are not told to present ourselves already clean.

And it means service — the lowest task in the household, assigned to the lowest servant, and taken up by the Lord of glory on the night he was betrayed.

Cleansing and humility. In Scripture they arrive in the same basin.

Let us be honest. Washing dreams tend to come to people who want to feel clean, or who are tired of taking care of everyone, or both.

If it is the first, the invitation stands and does not depend on our making a start: God does the washing, and he is not standing over the basin assessing the state we arrived in.

If it is the second — if we are the one always holding the towel — then let us hear what happened at that dinner. The one person who most deserved to be served was the one nobody had served. He noticed. He said so. And on the last night, he picked up the towel again anyway.

Being the one who washes is not a failure of status. It is the shape of the Lord himself. But Scripture also notices when nobody has washed our feet, and it is not wrong to say so.

May we be washed, and let ourselves be.

May we kneel for someone today without needing to be thanked for it.

And may we have, as she did, something to pour out — and the freedom not to care who is watching.

What does washing mean in Scripture?

Cleansing and preparation, almost always ritual rather than symbolic of a hidden message: the washings of Leviticus, Naaman told to wash in the Jordan (2 Kings 5:10), and Psalm 51:7 — “wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”

Is hair washed anywhere in the Bible?

Not as an act with meaning attached. The closest scene is Mary wiping Jesus’s feet with her hair after anointing them (John 12:3), which is the reverse of washing hair.

What should I do after a dream like this?

Take the feeling it left rather than the object. James 1:5 offers the method Scripture recommends: ask God for wisdom, not for a decoding.

• Dreaming of Dirty Water: The Bible Gives It No Meaning
• 24 Best Bible Verses About Baptism And Salvation
• 12 Prayers For Repentance: Simple & Powerful

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