What's black and white and read all over?
Apr. 17th, 2010 11:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhuI was struck this morning by the fact that there were five explicitly named colors in today's Torah reading -- white, black, yellow, reddish, and greenish. (Yes, we were reading about different kinds of rashes and skin diseases. Per our community's custom, a dermatologist read the portion. But I digress.)
This got me wondering if any other parsha is more colorful, as well as whether any of the nine "main" colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, white, black) are missing. For purposes of this query, I'm disregarding words for items of a particular color, such as techelet, when that word refers to the item and not to the color in general. (For an English example, if a passage refers to the sapphire on the breastplate of the High Priest, I don't count that as the color "sapphire.")
Edited to add: OK, the concordance considers techelet to be a color name. Who am I to argue? Well, it's really the dye; as argaman is to purple. The table has been updated to reflect that.
Looking at my concordance, which lists inflected forms together and which enumerates homographs separately by meaning, I found the following results:
This got me wondering if any other parsha is more colorful, as well as whether any of the nine "main" colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, white, black) are missing. For purposes of this query, I'm disregarding words for items of a particular color, such as techelet, when that word refers to the item and not to the color in general. (For an English example, if a passage refers to the sapphire on the breastplate of the High Priest, I don't count that as the color "sapphire.")
Edited to add: OK, the concordance considers techelet to be a color name. Who am I to argue? Well, it's really the dye; as argaman is to purple. The table has been updated to reflect that.
Looking at my concordance, which lists inflected forms together and which enumerates homographs separately by meaning, I found the following results:
Color tzeva Total Tazria-Metzora Notes
---------------------------------------------------
Blue* techelet 49 0 Refers to a blue dye. Paired with argaman 15 times.
Purple* argaman 38 0 Refers to a purple dye. Sagol never appears.
White lavan 29 18 A sizable total, and over half are in Lev. 13-14!
Red adom 21 6
Black shachor 6 2
Yellow tzahov 4 3 The 4th is a verb, "to cause to turn yellow", in Ezra 8
Green yarok 4 2 3 of the 4, including both Lev., are y'rakrak, "greenish"
Brown chum 4 0 All four are in Gen 30
Blue kachol 1 0 A hapax legomenon, in Ezekiel 23,
in an inflected construct form meaning "blue-eyed"
Orange katom 0 0
Purple sagol 0 0