Colors in the Bible and what they mean
The Bible names a handful of colors and explains very few of them. When a verse gives a color a meaning, it says so outright: Isaiah 1:18 sets sins “as scarlet” against “white as snow,” and Numbers 15:39 says the blue cord is there “that you may see it, and remember.” Most meanings in color charts (a color for each church season, “blue means heaven”) come from later tradition, not from the verses.
“Come now, and let’s reason together,” says Yahweh: “Though your sins are as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. Though they are red like crimson, they shall be as wool.
Isaiah 1:18. Hear Isaiah 1:18 sung, in BibleDo’s Isaiah 1:15-31.
Seven colors the Bible names
For each color: where the text names it, what the text itself ties it to, and what readers add.
White
- Where it appears
- Isaiah 1:18, Revelation 7:14, Matthew 17:2, Revelation 1:14, Exodus 16:31
- What the text ties it to
- Cleansing, twice in so many words. Isaiah turns scarlet sins “white as snow,” and in Revelation the robes are washed “and made them white in the Lamb’s blood.” At the Transfiguration, Jesus’ garments “became as white as the light.”
- What readers add
- “White means purity” fits those verses. White also describes manna and hair with no lesson attached, so not every white in Scripture is a symbol.
They washed their robes and made them white in the Lamb’s blood.
Revelation 7:14
Scarlet and red
- Where it appears
- Isaiah 1:18, Joshua 2:18, Exodus 26:31, Revelation 6:4, Matthew 27:28
- What the text ties it to
- Sin, in Isaiah 1:18, by the verse’s own comparison. Revelation’s red horse comes with a rider given “power to take peace from the earth.”
- What readers add
- Scarlet is also a cloth in the tabernacle veil and the thread Rahab ties in her window as a sign of rescue. A chart that says “red means sin” or “red means blood” is tighter than the text, which uses scarlet both ways.
Behold, when we come into the land, tie this line of scarlet thread in the window which you used to let us down.
Joshua 2:18
Purple
- Where it appears
- Exodus 26:31, Esther 8:15, Mark 15:17, John 19:2, Acts 16:14
- What the text ties it to
- A costly cloth. Mordecai leaves the king “with a robe of fine linen and purple,” Lydia is “a seller of purple,” and the soldiers dress Jesus in purple to mock him as a king.
- What readers add
- “Purple means royalty” is close to these verses. It describes who wore the cloth and what it cost, rather than a code the reader must decode.
A certain woman named Lydia, a seller of purple, of the city of Thyatira, one who worshiped God, heard us.
Acts 16:14
Blue
- Where it appears
- Numbers 15:38-39, Exodus 26:31, Esther 8:15
- What the text ties it to
- Remembering. Here the verse spells out the purpose itself: the blue cord on the fringe is there so Israel will “see it, and remember all Yahweh’s commandments.”
- What readers add
- “Blue means heaven” is not in these verses. The Hebrew word is תְּכֵלֶת (tekhelet), the same word in Numbers 15:38 and Exodus 26:31, a dye whose exact shade is still argued (below).
It shall be to you for a fringe, that you may see it, and remember all Yahweh’s commandments, and do them.
Numbers 15:39
Green
- Where it appears
- Psalm 23:2, Mark 6:39, Leviticus 13:49, Revelation 6:8
- What the text ties it to
- Grass and pasture: “He makes me lie down in green pastures,” and the crowd sits “on the green grass.” In Leviticus 13:49, “greenish” describes a mold on cloth.
- What readers add
- “Green means growth” is a reader’s inference. The Greek word for the green grass in Mark is the same word English Bibles render “pale” for Death’s horse (below).
Black
- Where it appears
- Revelation 6:5, Song of Songs 1:5
- What the text ties it to
- Revelation’s black horse comes with a rider holding “a balance in his hand.” The verse pairs the two and does not explain the color.
- What readers add
- “Black means death or famine” is drawn from the riders, not from a statement about the color. In the Song of Songs, the color word describes a woman, and translations differ on how the line reads (below).
Gold
- Where it appears
- Revelation 21:18, Esther 8:15
- What the text ties it to
- Gold in the Bible is mostly a metal, not a paint color: Mordecai’s “great crown of gold,” and a city that “was pure gold, like pure glass.”
- What readers add
- Charts that make gold a symbol go beyond these verses, which describe what things are made of.
The Hebrew words cover ranges
Biblical Hebrew does not hand you a modern paint deck. Athalya Brenner’s study of Old Testament color terms, as reviewed by Daniel Lys in 1983, describes a small set of main terms, each covering a range. John E. Hartley’s The Semantics of Ancient Hebrew Colour Lexemes (2010) is the full study.
| Root | Range | Seen in |
|---|---|---|
| אדם ’dm | red, brown and pink together | “reddish,” אֲדַמְדָּם, Leviticus 13:49 |
| לבן lbn | brightness and whiteness | “they shall be as white,” Isaiah 1:18 |
| שחר shḥr | dark to black | “I am dark,” Song of Songs 1:5 |
| ירק yrq | pale, through yellowish, to green | “greenish,” יְרַקְרַק, Leviticus 13:49 |
So a verse that says yrq may be nearer yellow than an English reader expects. None of this means people in the Bible saw fewer colors than we do. Radiolab’s “Why Isn’t the Sky Blue?” (2012) is about missing words, not missing eyes.
The tabernacle colors are names of dyed materials more than hues. Exodus 26:31 lists תְּכֵלֶת tekhelet (blue), אַרְגָּמָן argaman (purple), and שָׁנִי shani (scarlet) with fine linen, in one sentence and one cloth.
“You shall make a veil of blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine twined linen, with cherubim. It shall be the work of a skillful workman.
Exodus 26:31
Most passages name no color
Color words are rare in Scripture. Bible Gateway’s Dictionary of Bible Themes gives color one short entry, 4807, with a handful of verses. Even the rainbow names no colors. The Hebrew word in Genesis 9:13 is קֶשֶׁת qeshet, “my bow,” the ordinary word for an archer’s bow.
I set my rainbow in the cloud, and it will be a sign of a covenant between me and the earth.
Genesis 9:13
Any list that gives the rainbow seven meanings, or that colors a passage the text leaves without color, is adding to it.
Where translations disagree
Joseph’s coat
The World English Bible gives Joseph “a tunic of many colors” (Genesis 37:3). The Greek Septuagint uses a word glossed many-colored, spotted or dappled. The Hebrew phrase is less certain, and David Rudolph’s survey (Tradition, 2020) walks through other readings: a long robe, an ornamented one, a striped one. The same phrase dresses Tamar, the king’s daughter, in 2 Samuel 13:18, where the World English Bible says “a garment of various colors.”
The pale horse
Death rides “a pale horse” in Revelation 6:8. The Greek is χλωρός (chlōros), and Translation Insights and Perspectives notes its basic sense is green: it is the green grass of Mark 6:39. From the Latin Vulgate’s pallidus on, translators avoided a green horse as absurd, and “pale” has held in English. The same note points out that “pale” can sound like a sick horse, and that newer versions such as the NRSV say “pale green.” No English word fits cleanly.
The robe the soldiers used
In Matthew 27:28 the soldiers “put a scarlet robe on him” (Greek κοκκίνην). In Mark 15:17 “they clothed him with purple” (πορφύραν), and John 19:2 agrees with Mark. The UBS Handbook on Matthew reads Matthew’s as a soldier’s scarlet cloak and Mark’s as a royal robe, and notes that ancient purple ran from maroon into what we call purple. It may be one cloak seen two ways. The Gospels still use two words.
Manna
The same food gets three descriptions: “small as the frost on the ground” (Exodus 16:14), “like coriander seed, white” (Exodus 16:31), and “it looked like bdellium” (Numbers 11:7). What bdellium looked like is itself uncertain.
Dark, but lovely
The World English Bible reads Song of Songs 1:5 as “I am dark, but lovely” (Song of Songs 1:5). The NRSV Updated Edition reads “I am black and beautiful.” “But” and “and” make different sentences, and the choice between them belongs to the translator, not to the color.
The shade of tekhelet
The blue of the fringe cord is a dye, and the people who study it disagree on the shade. Ptil Tekhelet produces a blue thread from a murex snail for tzitzit today. Chemist Zvi Koren’s study of dyed yarns from Masada (Tradition, 2022) argues for a bluish purple. Any single swatch labeled “biblical blue” has picked a side.
Church colors and Mary’s blue came later
The vestment colors many churches use (white, red, green, violet, and sometimes black) are a Western schedule with a history, not a list in the Bible. The Catholic Encyclopedia’s article on liturgical colors traces it: white alone in the earliest centuries, four principal colors named by Pope Innocent III around 1200, the Roman rite’s five after Pius V, and most Eastern rites with no prescribed sequence. The Roman rite’s current rule is in chapter 6 of the General Instruction of the Roman Missal.
Mary’s blue cloak is one of the strongest habits in Christian painting, and much of it was ultramarine, a pigment ground from lapis lazuli, once worth more than gold. It is a tradition of painters, as in the Virgin of Guadalupe. No Gospel names the color of her clothes, and ultramarine is not the tekhelet dye.
Hear and see these passages
BibleDo’s Isaiah songs sing the World English Bible word for word, Isaiah 1:18 included. For the passages as pictures on a TV screen, Bible TV Art pairs paintings and photographs with their verses. If you like to color while you read, the Christian Coloring Club’s free library has Bible coloring pages to print.
Sources
- World English Bible text, read through Bible Gateway. Hebrew and Greek words through Bible Hub’s interlinear.
- Daniel Lys, review of Athalya Brenner, Colour Terms in the Old Testament, 1983.
- John E. Hartley, The Semantics of Ancient Hebrew Colour Lexemes, Peeters, 2010.
- Radiolab, “Why Isn’t the Sky Blue?”, 21 May 2012.
- Bible Gateway, Dictionary of Bible Themes, 4807 colours.
- Perseus, vocabulary for Genesis 37:3 in the Septuagint.
- David Rudolph, “How Colorful Was Joseph’s Coat?”, Tradition, Spring 2020.
- Translation Insights and Perspectives, Revelation 6:8, and the UBS Handbook on Matthew 27:28.
- Ptil Tekhelet, and Zvi C. Koren, article in Tradition 54.1, 2022.
- Catholic Encyclopedia, “Liturgical Colours”, and USCCB, General Instruction of the Roman Missal, chapter 6.
- Smarthistory, ultramarine (with the National Gallery) and the Virgin of Guadalupe.