The Color Purple

Parshat Terumah

In this week's parshah we learn about the commandments to construct the tabernacle and all the vessels therein. The actual construction will be carried out, with nearly identical language in a few weeks; this week we just hear the commands.  Somewhat surprising perhaps to religious people, the standard academic position is that the tabernacle in the desert never actually existed, and the entire sequence of construction was a later invention that attempted to retroject the features of the temple to an earlier age.  There are lots of supporting reasons for this assertion.  We will focus on one small anachronistic element this week in support of that conclusion.  It is not meant to be a comprehensive argument by any means.  Rather this week is an example of something that has always bugged me and that I wanted to research more.  It is yet another example of going into a topic not knowing what awaited me on the other side.

Many Ingredients

In several places the Torah lists the ingredients that go into each of the elements of the tabernacles.  One such verse near the beginning of the parshah (Exod 25:4) says:

And blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine linen, and goats' hair

The first ingredient blue, in Hebrew techelet, has generated a lot of interest in religious circles, mainly because of its association with tzitzit.  The color appears to have fallen out of use for long enough that no one is exactly sure what color it actually is, and how to extract it.  However, that is not our focus this week.  Instead, our focus is on the second color, purple, in Hebrew argaman.  This color, along with the blue, was used in nearly every cloth item in the tabernacle.  It was used in the ten curtains (yeriot, Exod 26:1), the skirt of the ark (parochet Exod 26:31), the screen for the entrance to the tabernacle (masach, Exod 26:31) as well as the screen for the entrance to the courtyard (Exod 27:15).  Addtionally it's used the garments for the Kohanim (priests) which we read about next week.

We know this color a bit better because purple played an important role throughout the Greek and Roman eras.  To track down more about the history of purple I hit up the local library.  The only work I was able to find was a monograph from 1969 by Meyer Reinhold [1].  Normally, I like multiple works to compare against each other, but unfortunately, that was not available here, so we'll have to do with just one.

A Foreign Word

If you're knowledgeable about biblical Hebrew, you probably know that argaman is not a native Hebrew word. It does not have a standard three letter root which is indicative of Hebrew origins.  The first question I had is where did this word come from.  Looking at nearby cultures, the word appears in Ugarit as argmn, in Assyro-Babylonian as argamannu, and possibly in Hittite as arkammas [2].  Beyond that the origin is obscure.  Strong lists a possible derivation from Sanskrit, but it is speculative at best.  Another guess from Albright traces it to a Luyyan word meaning tribute [3] .  One thing is clear, the origin of the word came from the North/East.  It did not come from the southwest, i.e. Egypt.  This will be important later.

Where Did they get the Stuff?

One question that might occur to you while you're reading this parshah is, "where did the Israelites get all the stuff."  Fortunately, this is not an actual plot hole.  The Torah has this one covered.  When the Israelites left Egypt, they took lots of items from the Egyptians.   For example, God tells Moses that when they leave (Exod 3:21-22):

21 And I will give this people favour in the sight of the Egyptians. And it shall come to pass, that, when ye go, ye shall not go empty; 22 but every woman shall ask of her neighbour, and of her that sojourneth in her house, jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment; and ye shall put them upon your sons, and upon your daughters; and ye shall spoil the Egyptians.'

And again, right before the 10th plague (Exod. 11:1-2)

1 And the LORD said unto Moses: 'Yet one plague more will I bring upon Pharaoh, and upon Egypt; afterwards he will let you go hence; when he shall let you go, he shall surely thrust you out hence altogether. 2 Speak now in the ears of the people, and let them ask every man of his neighbour, and every woman of her neighbour, jewels of silver, and jewels of gold.' 

 And sure enough when they left (Exod. 12:35-36):

35 And the children of Israel did according to the word of Moses; and they asked of the Egyptians jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment. 36 And the LORD gave the people favour in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let them have what they asked. And they despoiled the Egyptians.

So, reading the story literally, it's certainly consistent that the Israelites would have lots of gold and silver and all sorts of other valuables from which to construct the temple.  It's a little more questionable that they would have brought lumber and other bulk materials.  But what about purple dye, or purple dyed thread.  Is it reasonable that the Israelites could have looted that from Bronze Age Egypt?

To the History Books

The question we ask is, would the Israelites have found purple dye in Egypt while they were there.  Another question is, would the Egyptians have considered purple valuable so that the Israelites, steeped in Egyptian culture at this point, would even think to take it.  The answer to both questions is no.  Reinhold says that purple was a symbol of prestige from the early second millennium.  It was exported from the Phoenician coast, likely harvested from sea creatures.  However, it was never popular in Egypt.  From Reinhold:

Far more certain is that we have no evidence for the valuation of purple as a status symbol token in Pharaonic Egypt [4]. 

He continues to say that any attribution to Egypt for discovering purple or using it as a prestige color before the Mesopotamian nations is "erroneous."  He addresses this question directly later on directly:

It is well known that among the Jews in antiquity a high valuation was placed upon the color purple, both as a ritual and sacerdotal color and as a prestige symbol in general.  We do not know when it acquired this status among the Jews.  (The view that the Jews acquired this symbol during their stay in Egypt is untenable.)  If our knowledge of the Jewish use of purple as a prestige token both religious and secular, does indeed antedate the Babylonian captivity, we may conjecture that it acquired this special cachet among them either directly from the Tyrians, or from the international prestige value of the color under Assyrian influence.  The least conjectural view would be to assign the beginnings of the valuation of purple among the Jews to the time of the Babylonian captivity, the Restoration, and the influence of Persian practice [5].

Furthermore, Reinhold mentions that in the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE, the references to purple seem to disappear even among those regions (Babyon, Ugarit) where it was popular previously.  It returns to prominence in the 9th century BCE, at a time where the Israelite and Judahite kingdoms were already established.

The conclusion is that, there's no way the Jews could have constructed a tabernacle with purple using only Egyptian spoils.  The Egyptians didn't care for it, nor would Israelites living in Egypt consider it worth carrying out.  There was no purple in Egypt for them to take, and they certainly couldn't manufacture it in the desert. The valuation of purple as a status symbol cannot stem from anything prior to an encounter with the Mesopotamian peoples.

Conclusion

As I said at the beginning, there are a lot of reasons to think the Tabernacle construction is not a realistic endeavor to the desert.  The anachronistic element of purple is just one of many.  While it might indeed be conceivable that wandering Israelites might construct a portable temple, they would not have used purple in it.  They couldn't have had it, and they wouldn't have valued it anyway.  Far more reasonable is it to assume that these descriptions were written much later, putting materials that were desirable and expensive at the time they were written in the far past, without realizing that those materials are badly out of place at the described time.

If the tabernacle was a real object, it must have been created later with materials available in Canaan.   The other alternative is it was not real at all, rather it was a fiction written by later authors who attempted to justify the sacrificial services they were currently doing by retrojecting it into the distant past.  We'll see exactly this type of retrojection in the opposite way, in order to discredit a current practice by a rival priestly guild in two weeks when we discuss the golden calf.   

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1. M. Reinhold, "The History of Purple as a Status Symbol in Antiquity" 1969^

2. Reinhold p. 11^

3. W.F. Albright, Bulletin of the Amer. Schools of Oriental Research, 50, Apr 1933, 15^

4. Reinhold p. 12^

5. Reinhold p. 20^