The Mystery of the Biblical Word for “Yellow”

We tend to think of colors as fixed properties, and anyone who has studied French, Spanish, German, or Modern Hebrew knows that the basic crayon-box colors have exact equivalents in these languages. But this is not true of all languages. Russian, for instance, has no precise equivalent for “blue,” and other tongues have only two or three words for colors altogether. There was once a Yiddish humor magazine called Royte Pomerantsen—“Red Oranges”—because Yiddish had a word for the fruit but not for the hue. Biblical Hebrew has words meaning white (lavan), black (shahor), and red (adom), as well as names for specific dyes like the turquoise t’khelet. Other color words are a bit of mystery, which leads to problems in interpreting this week’s Torah reading, with its detailed discussions of a dermatological ailment usually rendered as “leprosy.” Phil Lieberman explains: