(This page has been modified from a series of posts to my blog, which began on February 14th, 2005, with Valentine's Day, and ended on March 25th, with Good Friday. I thank those who read and commented on this series in the previous form, and would welcome the same on this page. Go to my home page for information on how to contact me.
I especially thank my daughters. One reminded me of the correct spelling of a name, and one reminded me of the use of color in church liturgy.)
I know that there are people who can't see at all, and people who can't see all the colors. I'm not grateful enough for the ability to see, and to see color.
Most people can distinguish many colors. Interior decorators,
lipstick and car manufacturers, and many other merchandisers, want us to
recognize many colors, with many names. Here is the
Wikipedia article
on colors, which includes
bistre (!) as a color. As they say, it's a partial list. (See
here for the Crayola company's pages on our 50 favorite colors. They
don't say how many aren't our favorite colors.)
In spite of our ability to see, and name, many colors, I'm posting on less
than a dozen. Its on the seven colors of the rainbow, ROYGBIV (Red, Orange,
Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet) as I was taught them in
grade school. I have added black, white, brown, gray, gold and silver. Some writers do not use ROYGBIV for the colors of the
rainbow, but ROYGBV, widening blue and violet and dropping the use of
indigo. Isaac Newton, himself, reported the colors separated by his prism to
be red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. So, if it was good
enough for Newton, it's good enough for me.
Visible light is a small part of the
electromagnetic spectrum, with wavelengths between about 400 and 700
nanometers. The
Wikipedia article on color
says that red colored light has wavelengths between 740 and 625 nm; orange,
625 and 590; yellow, 590 and 565; green, 565 and 500; cyan (not blue) 500
and 485; blue, 485 and 440; and violet light has wavelengths between 440 and
380 nanometers. The McGraw-Hill Dictionary
of Physics, 3rd edition (New York: McGraw, 2003) says that the
parameters are 770 to 622 nanometers for red, 622 to 597 for orange, 597 to
577 for yellow, 577 to 492 for green, 492 to 455 for blue, and 455 to 390
for violet. (There is no indigo in this scheme.) This reference says,
correctly, that these are an "approximate range" for each color. The
Wikipedia article says:
The color table should not be
interpreted as a definite list—the pure spectral colors form a continuous
spectrum, and how it is divided into distinct colors is a matter of taste
and culture.
The bottom line is that there is not complete agreement on the definitions
of the various colors, or even on their names. Hence, as I remark below on
orange,
it is no wonder that there is no occurrence of that word in scripture.
Normal humans have three types of cone cells, which are our color receptors, in their retinas. They are most sensitive, respectively, to light with wavelengths of 564, 534 and 420 nanometers. (These light waves can be called yellowish-green, green, and bluish-violet.) Note that the color receptors are not spread evenly over the spectrum. Why? What are the implications? I'm not sure.
What color is perceived is due to more than just the wavelength. Other factors, such as what other colors we are seeing, whether we are seeing reflected or emitted light, and intensity, have an influence.
Do I know that I see green, or even light with a wavelength of 540 nanometers, the same way as you do? No, I don't.
References:
efg's Color Reference
library, a page of links on color, categorized.
What is color? from Pantone. Discussion of perception of color, and how color is produced in printing, and on monitors.
"The Importance of Context in Color Perception." Excerpt from Neuroscience, 2nd edition, published by Sinauer.
Page from the American Psychological Association, summarizing research which indicates that ". . . color terms are learned relative to language and culture" (as opposed to being dependent on the properties of human color vision)
Page from Hewlett-Packard, which lists emotions associated with various colors, in Western societies. (For example: "Gray: elegance, humility, respect, reverence, subtlety")
See this page for information on where some colors got their names.
Color in liturgical
use:
I attend a non-liturgical church (We have our rituals, but
they aren't printed in the bulletin!) and this topic just didn't occur to me. Our younger
daughter attends one, and she reminded me that, to liturgical churches,
colors have significance in worship. I did a Google search, something like
"blue green Episcopal," and the first hit was
here. This
church's web page had the following table on the significance of some
colors in worship:
| BLUE - heavenly strength and faithfulness |
| WHITE - purity, innocence, and joy |
| GOLD - purity and splendor |
| RUBY or RED - the blood of life, sacrifice, and therefore, love |
| GREEN - Spring, hope, eternal life, and the Holy Trinity |
| YELLOW - the revealed truth, as the sun breaking through clouds after a storm |
| BROWN - the earthly, or the mundane |
| GRAY - the earthly, or mundane, and humility |
| PURPLE and VIOLET - royalty, or penance |
Red
Red is a
popular color. The Wikipedia has a good
article on it. There are
positive and negative associations with the color. U. S. stop signs are red.
A person who is angry is sometimes described as "seeing red." Teachers often
grade papers with red markers. We eat (or don't) red meat.
The national flags of Canada,
China, Indonesia, Japan, and the United States all use red, as do those of
other countries. That of China, the world's most populous country, is almost
all red.
Blood is often described as red. However, only oxygenated blood is red. I've
given blood, or had blood drawn, many times, and such blood is dark red, or
reddish brown, because it comes from veins, where it has less oxygen. The
red cells of blood
are very important, although they have basically only one function. That
function is to furnish oxygen to the other cells of the body. Hemoglobin is
the molecule in red cells that carries oxygen. When oxygen combines with the
iron in hemoglobin, the hemoglobin has a red color.
Some of the largest stars are called
red giants. They are
cooler than most other stars.
Many flowers are red. Red roses, of course, are associated with Valentine's
Day.
Bees
aren't able to see the color red. (They can see ultraviolet, which we
can't see.)
In the US and Canada, at least, red is
often a warning color, as in stop signs and stop lights.
Red in the Bible
The Bible uses red in a number of ways, or to stand for a number of things,
as we do today. Here are some of those.
The Israelites crossed the Red sea. The Wikipedia
article on that body of
water indicates that the name may be a mistranslation of
Reed sea, or may be because of
seasonal algal blooms of a red color, or may be because of red-colored
mountains near it. Over half of the occurrences of "red" in scripture refer
to that crossing.
Red was significant in Jewish ceremonial law. God directed that some of the
covering of the tabernacle be skins dyed red. (There are five statements
about this, from Exodus 25:5 to 39:34.) God specified that a red heifer be
used to prepare the water for cleansing those who had been ceremonially
unclean (Numbers 19).
Zachariah 1:8 and 6:2, and Revelation 6:4 prophesy about a man riding a red
horse, as symbolic of war. The man in Revelation (perhaps also in Zechariah)
is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Isaiah said that though sins were red like crimson, they could be as white
as wool. That's interesting, because, in both the Old and New Testaments,
blood was used in atonement for sin. So, symbolically speaking, red sin can
be washed with red blood, and becomes white!
Whether it was red or
reddish-brown, Christ's blood was
the most precious substance in earth's history.
Esau apparently had red hair at birth
(Genesis 25:25). Actually, naturally red hair is orange, or orange-red, in
color, in most cases.
Infrared
The visible colors are only a small part (less than an octave) of the
electromagnetic spectrum. Infrared light is a little redder than red, so
to speak. Better put, its waves are of a slightly lower frequency, and a
slightly longer wavelength, than red light. Infrared is also called radiant
heat.
Some animals are able
to perceive infrared light. They aren't able to do this with their eyes, but
with other specialized organs. Humans can perceive infrared light with
special instruments, which are used in hunting at night, night photography,
and in warfare
Red and Valentine's
Day
I'm not certain why the color red came to be associated with valentine's
day. My guess is that the association is related to the heart, the
blood-pumping organ, which is often thought of as the seat of the emotions.
The heart isn't really the seat of the emotions, and it doesn't really look
like a valentine. It doesn't have a sharp point at one end, and two equal
curves at the other. I wonder where the valentine shape comes from. Here's a
theory
on that, involving a flower.
Orange
The word, orange,
is said to
come from the fruit, not the other way around. Unlike red, orange isn't used
in the Bible. There must be reasons for that, but I don't know them. I
speculate that the Hebrew and Greek languages had no words for orange, and
didn't recognize it as a color. If so, their red and yellow must have been
broader than ours.
Orange is the color of oranges, at least some oranges. Orange is a color
often used by athletic teams. Clemson University and Tennessee come to mind,
because of my present geographical location. There's a quirky comic strip,
Rhymes with Orange, which, I
believe, is so named because no words do that. (Check
it out!)
Orange, the
color that is not used in the Bible, and the word that has no rhymes, is a
symbol of our uniqueness. We are, indeed, unique before God. No one can
exactly replace me. That means that I've got special functions, special
things that I should do, if God's plan is to be fulfilled in this world. I
hope that writing this blog is one of those!
It is, of course, possible to over-emphasize our uniqueness. We may be
unique, but we are no better than anyone else, no more special.
Eat an orange.
Yellow
Yellow is the color of gold. Sulfur is yellow. It is the
color of butter and the spreads which replace it. It is the
color of the
sun. (The color of stars indicates something about their physical
states.) Even though the sun is yellow, sunlight can be separated into all
the colors of the rainbow.
I found only four uses of
yellow in
the Bible. Three of them are from Leviticus 13:30-36, which describes how to
diagnose a person with a serious skin disease. (Look for yellow hair) The
other reference compares the worshipper to the gold-colored feathers of a
dove.
Here's the Wikipedia article
on yellow.
Many flowers are yellow. Not only are flowers yellow, but most or all pollen
is yellow. Yellow is, thus, associated with spring. The
daffodils/jonquils/whatever you call them are in bloom here as I write.
(Common names for living things are fine, but not everybody uses the same
one for the same thing. That's why scientific names are important.)
Yellow tends to disappear, at least against a white background. Here's the
color I decided to use for this post:
yellow.
Even that isn't very clear
on the white background I am typing on. This color:
yellow
(Which, to me, is a true yellow. Whoops! I know, there
isn't any such thing.) is almost invisible. There's a lesson in there, I
guess. Generally, I shouldn't try to stand out, but to blend in.
Yellow has some negative connotations. It's the color of caution lights.
It's the color of cowardice. But, as in daffodils, the sun, and butter, it
has positive connotations, too. Let's not forget the school bus, in the US,
anyway. Is that
negative or positive? Positive, I hope.
Go out and look at the sun. Carefully. Don't look directly at it!
Many cities in the U. S. are named Greenville, or
Greeneville, either named after someone named Green, or just because someone
thought that the color was a good one. Two of my own state's largest are
Greenville and Greenwood, South Carolina. Some states have more than one
Greenville.
Another is that one of the earliest works of English literature is
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, probably over six centuries old now.
Go here for a web
site on this work (there are others). Tolkien, who was an expert on ancient
literature, wrote a book about this and other works.
Blue
Using (of course!) the
Blueletter Bible, I find that
the word, blue,
occurs 50 times in the King James Version of the Bible. All of these refer
to fabric of some sort. Most of them are in Exodus and Numbers, and refer to
various fabrics associated with Divine Worship. There is no reference to the
blue of the sky, or the blue of water.
So
why is the sky blue? Basically, because molecules in the
air bend blue light more than other colors, so the blue is spread around. Here's
an article explaining
the blueness of the sky. As it says, the color proves that atoms exist. (But the
article says that the sky is really violet -- we
see blue a lot better, so don't perceive it as violet.)
Why is water blue?
Here's one explanation.
Here's
another. Basically, both of them explain the blueness of water in almost the
same way as that of the sky. Blue light is spread more, and reddish light is
absorbed.
The Wikipedia says that
blue gets
its name from a word meaning "shining."
Moving to another type of sense modality, there is a variety of music known
as the blues. George Gershwin wrote a
ground-breaking piece entitled "Rhapsody
in Blue." People refer to themselves as being blue, when they are sad or
depressed, and I believe that the blues is music about bad times.
There's a hockey team called the
St. Louis Blues.
Duke and
North Carolina are Atlantic Coast Conference basketball rivals. (Both,
now and historically, have been very good teams--Michael Jordan played for
one of them.) Both have blue uniforms, but the colors are different.
Blue blood refers to being aristocratic. (Blood in the veins, seen through
fair skin, does look blue.)
Why doesn't the Bible mention either sky or water as being blue? I don't
know. I speculate that it was because they were taken for granted. Things
that we take for granted are seldom discussed. There is next to no
discussion of ordinary meals, or of clothing, in the New Testament, for
example. I suppose that people then, as they do now, took the color of the
sky, and of the water, for granted.
I try to remind myself of things that I take for granted, and to be thankful
for them. Water and air, whatever their colors, should not be taken for
granted. How long has it been since I was thankful for them?
I hope you aren't blue.
Indigo occurs in scientific usage. A February 15th, 2005, article in Nature News describes lobsters as indigo in color. That's until they are cooked, when they become red. There's a chemical/physical explanation for the change of color, if you really want to know about this.
Like indigo, my name isn't near the top of some lists. There's no reason that it should be. So what? What would the rainbow be without indigo? Seriously flawed. Perhaps you and I have some importance in God's master plan, even if we are far down on some list.
Some writers do not use ROYGBIV for the colors of the rainbow, but ROYGBV, widening blue and violet and dropping the use of indigo.
So what is violet? Let's put it this way. It's the color furthest from red in the rainbow--bluer than blue.
Voltaire wrote as follows:
Sir Isaac Newton has demonstrated to the eye, by the bare assistance of the
prism, that light is a composition of coloured rays, which, being united,
form white colour. A single ray is by him divided into seven, which all fall
upon a piece of linen, or a sheet of white paper, in their order, one above
the other, and at unequal distances. The first is red, the second orange,
the third yellow, the fourth green, the fifth blue, the sixth indigo, the
seventh a violet-purple. Each of these rays, transmitted afterwards by a
hundred other prisms, will never change the colour it bears; in like manner,
as gold, when completely purged from its dross, will never change afterwards
in the crucible. - Voltaire, Letters on the
English, Letter
XVI.
So violet, like indigo, has a distinguished history as a color name. Newton used it. (I'm not suggesting that he invented these names, just that he used them, thus dignifying them as part of his study of optics. He pioneered that field, as well as the study of motion.)
There is a plant, or several plants, named violet, or violets. See here for the American Violet Society homepage, and here for The Violet Society's. A minor character in the comic strip Peanuts was named Violet.
Here's the Wikipedia article on violet. As of March 5, 2006, it is short.
One good product of writing this series has been that it has made me think. One thing that hadn't occurred to me before is to ask why, if the color spectrum is part of a linear series, it can be thought of as a wheel? Violet is next to red on color wheels. That seems to be as if, in singing a scale, you went from middle C to high C , and, instead of on to high D, immediately back to the D above middle C. Why can colors be arranged in a circle? Here's an answer:
The sensation of violet caused by short-wavelength light appears somewhat purple, as if it contained long (red) wavelengths. The cause for this is that the long-wavelength ("red") receptors in the human retina are sensitive to the wavelengths in the violet region as well as the longer wavelengths in the red region of the spectrum. Violet is therefore perceived as a stimulus to both red and blue cones. - http://www.answers.com/topic/violet-color
Colors are part of a linear series, the electromagnetic spectrum. The next category, a little shorter in wavelength, a little higher in frequency, and with a little more energy than violet light, is ultraviolet. The Wikipedia article (previous link) on the subject says that some reptiles, birds, and insects can see ultraviolet. This means that their eye pigments aren't exactly the same as ours. Some objects in nature, including at least some birds and flowers, are partly colored ultraviolet. Our eyes just can't see them--some animals can. There are things that believers can see, figuratively speaking, that non-believers can't. There are things God can see that I can't. My eyes aren't made right.
Pigments
absorb light. DNA absorbs ultraviolet, which means that DNA is absorbing energy.
That means that DNA may be changed, or mutated, by exposure to ultraviolet
light. Thus we can get skin cancers. Ultraviolet exposure also damages collagen,
a protein found in skin (and elsewhere). Use sunblock.
The sky is really
violet
, not blue.
Brown
Brown doesn't appear in the rainbow.
Nevertheless, we can see brown. What's going on here?
Here's the Wikipedia entry
on brown. The article says that brown is a mixture of two colors (more than
one such pair exists, according to this reference.) If that is true, then
brown can't be in the rainbow, because the colors mixed are not adjacent to
each other.
Here's
another reference on the same question, which comes to the same
conclusion.
The King James Bible has just four references to brown, all of them in
Genesis 30, and all referring to the color of a domestic animal. I confess
that I've always had trouble with this passage. The Bible describes Jacob
gaining livestock property from his father-in-law by, Genesis says, exposing
animals, in the act of mating, to certain visual stimuli. From this I
conclude (as if I needed this passage to prove it) there are things I don't
understand about the Bible. (I think I understand as much as I need to.) My
take on what happened is that Jacob thought doing this would work. God knew
it wouldn't, but intervened on Jacob's behalf, anyway.
It seems strange that there are no references to brown earth, brown rocks,
brown wood, or brown bread in the Bible. I suppose that, like us, people
living back then took these things for granted, and didn't describe them
much.
There is a National Football Team, the
Cleveland Browns. (To me,
their color is orange, not brown!)
One of Tolkien's wizards was
Radagast the Brown. Tolkien didn't write a lot about him.
I suppose any article on brown should refer to
Charlie Brown, the main character of
Peanuts.
There are star-like objects, called
brown dwarfs.
The Wikipedia article
on them says that they are probably the most common objects at or near the
size of stars in our galaxy.
I hesitate to say this, but, having mentioned the appropriate bodily function in
a
blog post, already, might as well: excrement is usually brown. The reason is that
bile, one of the important
products of the liver, by way of the gall bladder, is brown. As
this page from the MadSci network says, it could be worse.
Brown vs. Board of
Education of Topeka was a landmark Supreme Court decision.
Brown, like
Green,
is a relatively common last name in North America, going back to England and
Germany, (as Braun) and perhaps other countries.
Brownian motion,
named for an English scientist,
Robert Brown,
who discovered it in the 19th century, is a jiggly motion of microscopic
particles, caused by random collisions with even smaller particles. Einstein
published a
paper explaining this phenomenon. His paper changed the views of
scientists--molecules were finally understood as being real objects. Most of
them hadn't accepted this before. Robert Brown also
described and named the nucleus of the living cell, although he didn't
discover it.
I sometimes think of myself as brown, dull, common. Common, nothing special
about me. That's true. It also isn't true. I'm not special, but God knows me
as unique and of infinite worth
A commenter to my blog suggested that brown actually is part
of the rainbow. Sorry. I don't think so.
Let me use an analogy to explain. Musical instruments, or the human voice,
don't emit pure tones, with only a single wavelength and frequency. The
violin string, or the trombone, vibrate at the frequency of the tone the
musician is trying to produce, and also at higher frequencies, called
overtones. The pattern of these is one of the things that enables us to
tell a violin from a flute, or to tell different voices apart. If we could
produce musical instruments that produced a single tone, we could still
get combinations, by having more than one played at the same time, or, on
a piano, by playing more than one note at once. We call these chords. They
produce harmony.
Well, light consists of discrete
waves/particles, each with a single frequency. Some of them, with
particular frequencies, are red, for example. Others are yellow, etc.
There aren't any single waves/particles that are brown, or white.
Brown and white are
the light equivalent of chords. For sound, the ear and the brain put two
or more frequencies together to make a chord. For light, the eye and the
brain put many colors together, and we perceive white, or a couple of
colors together, and we perceive brown. Brown isn't part of the rainbow.
The Wikipedia has an article on silver as a color. (There is also one about it as a metal, of course.) The article says that its shine is what makes this color unique. It isn't just a gray. It also says that silver color ". . . cannot be reproduced by a simple solid color, because the shiny effect is due to the material's brightness varying with the surface angle to the light source." In art, therefore, metallic paints are used for silver. Gold does not get an article as a color. The Wikipedia article on gold as a metal says what we already know, namely that gold is a shiny yellow color. The shiny effect presumably is similar to silver's. The same article says something that's probably not well known, namely that gold can be "black, ruby, or purple when finely divided."
One of the 16 standard VGA colors is silver, but, as you can see it's a dull gray, with no luster. (I can see this in FrontPage, which I use to draft these posts. There's a drop-down box with 16 standard colors, and one of them is named silver. The same is true in other Office applications.) I'm not going to put any gold color on this page. It just wouldn't work. I'm just using a yellow.
The word, gold, occurs in 361 verses in the Bible. All but one are about the metal. There are 61 verses with golden. All of these refer to the metal.
Silver occurs in 282 verses. In all of these, the reference is to metal.
There are 164 verses with both silver and gold, 4 with both silver and golden. Clearly, there's a lot in the Bible about these precious metals.
This is the only Bible verse that I could find that comes close to referring to either of these as a color: Psalm 68:13 says: "Though ye have lien among the pots, [yet shall ye be as] the wings of a dove covered with silver, and her feathers with yellow gold." Even this verse may not have meant to refer to colors, but to metal. The idea seems to be that God can turn Cinderella (lying among blackened pots) to a princess.
The word, gold, does occur as a color in popular use. Goldilocks is one example. The story has also been told as Silverhair. (See here for a page on the naming of this tale.) C. S. Lewis wrote The Silver Chair. Senior citizens are sometimes called silverhaired, or are referred to as being in their golden years. Sharon Shinn, one of my favorite fantasy authors, wrote Heart of Gold, about a race of people who were gold colored. Galadriel, the most important elf in J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books, probably was named for her golden hair, which was characteristic of her family. The Ring, itself, may have been made of gold, but, if so, it had properties that ordinary gold does not. As in the Bible, the main use of the word gold (and silver) in our culture is as a precious metal, valuable, shiny, and easily workable.
Gold, Silver, and Golden occur occasionally as last names. So do Goldblum, Goldberg, Goldsmith, Silverberg, and other variations. Robert Silverberg is an important author of fantastic fiction. See here for my page on some of his works.
These posts are not about metals, but colors. Nonetheless, I quote
Lamentations 4:1: "How is the gold become dim! [how] is the most fine gold
changed! the stones of the sanctuary are poured out in the top of every
street."
Also James 5:3 "Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them
shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire.
Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days."
Gold doesn't become dim, and neither metal can be cankered, but God was
using these statements to show that purity is not necessarily permanent.
Peter compared the Christian life to the purifying of gold by heat: 1 Peter 1:7: "That the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ:"
I hope that I shine, because I am pure.
Easton's Bible Dictionary says that both purple and scarlet were worn by the wealthy and important.
Purple occurs 48 times in the Bible. 26 of these are in combination with blue and scarlet, in various fabrics associated with temple worship. Most of the other references have to do with clothing worn by royalty, including Jesus, who was mockingly given a purple robe to wear (John 19:2, 5). Lydia, perhaps the first convert to Christianity in Europe, was a merchant of purple cloth (Acts 16:14).
Scarlet occurs 52 times in the Bible. Half of them are in the combination of blue, purple and scarlet, as above. Scarlet is used to describe our sins in Isaiah 1:18. Scarlet thread is used in rituals for cleansing, especially in Lev 14:4-52. Rahab hung scarlet thread in her window, so that her family would be spared when Jericho was taken. (Joshua 2:18, 21) Scarlet thread was used to identify the first-born twin when Tamar had Judah's sons. (Genesis 38) There is a woman in Revelation, who sits on a scarlet beast, and wears scarlet. (Chapter 17)
Crimson occurs five times in the Bible. Three of them are in II Chronicles 2:7 through 3:14, referring to temple furnishings. One is in Isaiah 1:18, where our sins are compared to both scarlet and crimson, probably for emphasis, but where they will be made white. (There are several songs that speak of the transition from crimson, or scarlet, to white.) The fifth is in Jeremiah 4:30, where it says that even though Israel clothes herself in crimson, she will be punished.
Roman Catholics have used purple to indicate penance. During the Lenten season, there are many churches, of many denominations, that have placed a purple cloth draped over a cross on their lawns, to commemorate Christ's suffering.
Here's an example of blood being scarlet, or at least redder than red:
And there, on the golden
gravel of the bed of the stream, lay King Caspian, dead, with the water
flowing over him like liquid glass. His long white beard swayed in it like
water-weed. And all three stood and wept. Even the Lion wept: great
Lion-tears, each tear more precious than the Earth would be if it was a
single solid diamond. . . .
"Son of Adam," said Aslan, "go into that thicket and pluck the thorn that
you will find there, and bring it to me."
Eustace obeyed. The thorn was a foot long and sharp as a rapier.
"Drive it into my paw, son of Adam," said Aslan. . . .
"Must I?" said Eustace.
"Yes," said Aslan.
Then Eustace set his teeth and drove the the thorn into the Lion's paw.
And there came out a great drop of blood, redder than all the redness that
you have ever seen or imagined. And it splashed into the stream over the
dead body of the King. . . . And the dead King began to be changed. His
white beard turned to grey, and from grey to yellow, and got shorter and
vanished altogether; and his sunken cheeks grew round and fresh, and the
wrinkles were smoothed, and his eyes opened, and his eyes and lips both
laughed, and suddenly he leaped up and stood before them--a very young
man, or a boy. . . . And he rushed to Aslan and flung his arms as far as
they would go round the huge neck; and he gave Aslan the strong kisses of
a King, and Aslan gave him the wild kisses of a Lion. C. S. Lewis, The
Silver Chair, New York: Macmillan, 1953, pp. 203-4.
U. S. military personnel wounded in combat may be given a purple heart. There is a bird named the purple martin.
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter, wherein Hester was forced to advertise her adultery by wearing a scarlet A, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote A Study in Scarlet. Scarlet fever is an infectious disease. There is a bird named the scarlet tanager.
Alabama sports teams are known as the Crimson Tide. Harvard publishes a newspaper called the Harvard Crimson.Scarlet, crimson and purple have a lot of significance. They signify the cleansing blood of Christ, royalty, and being specially marked.
The Wikipedia article on gray says that it is produced by mixing other colors. You won't find gray in rainbows, because it is a mixture.
Gray is also spelled grey, in British English.
There are six uses of the word, gray, in the Bible. All of them are in the Old Testament, and all of them refer to the hair of older persons. Gray is used to refer to older people now, as in "gray power."
The brain contains gray matter.
Grayscale images are images with shades of black and white. Black and white TVs are actually grayscale TVs.
The South mostly wore gray in the Civil War. There are gray squirrels, and gray foxes.
Gandalf the wizard was called Gandalf the Grey in Tolkien's books. He became Gandalf the White later.
Eeyore, in Winnie-The-Pooh, was an old grey donkey.
A couple of items on several colors,
or all colors:
The Astronomy Picture of the Day for Feb 27, 2005, is a
spectrum of
the sun, spread out more than we are used to seing.
More on
color
and fantastic literature:
Jack Vance is one of
the great writers of fantastic fiction. He has won two
Hugo awards, and has
written for over four decades. He is distinguished by his baroque use of
words, and by his imagination. Some of his magical realms have colors that
human eyes don't normally see. (Of course Vance can't describe them!) One
of his novels, Alastor: Marune, is
set on a planet with four suns, orange, blue, red and green. Vance wrote
that the citizens' moods and behavior changed, depending on which
combination of suns were in the sky. A Vance fan, Eric Halsey, has created
a free downloadable
software
program that shows the 16 color combinations of these four moons.
(Warning: file is several megabytes in size.)
Back to White:
Easton's Bible Dictionary, available through the
Blueletter Bible, says the
following, in its article on "Colour": White occurs as the translation of
various Hebrew words. It is applied to milk (
Gen 49:12),
manna ( Exd
16:31), snow (
Isa 1:18),
horses ( Zec
1:8), raiment (
Ecc 9:8).
Another Hebrew word so rendered is applied to marble (
Est 1:6),
and a cognate word to the lily (
Sgs 2:16).
A different term, meaning "dazzling," is applied to the countenance (
Sgs 5:10).
White occurs 75 times in 66 different Bible verses. It is used to describe animal skin color, the effects of leprosy, fabric, snow, cleansing, fields ready to harvest, a white stone given to believers, and a few other items. Revelation has more use of the word than any other in the New Testament.
In our culture, white is often used as a symbol of purity. Brides are supposed to wear white for this reason. One reason that we associate it with purity--it's not the only one--is that snow, after it has cleaned out the acid and particles in the air, is clean and white. There are Christian songs that speak of cleansing, and becoming "Whiter than Snow."
Besides snow, some other important substances are white, including cotton fibers (usually), salt, sugar, milk (usually) and the white of eggs. Part of the visible human eye is white, as are our teeth, ideally. There are white flowers, and white rocks, and white domestic animals. Wild animals in snowy parts of the earth are often white, at least during snow season. Clouds are white, unless they are too thick for much light to get through, or unless tinted red by sunlight near the time of sunset or sunrise.
White blood cells are a vital part of our body's defenses. White matter is part of our brain.
In sports, it is common to mark boundaries in white, and to use white balls, or the equivalent (although not in all sports). In team sports in the U. S., the home team often wears white. (If anyone can tell me why, I'd appreciate knowing.)
Part of the appeal of the bald eagle as a symbol, in the United States, is because of its white head.
Unfortunately, it is possible that prejudice toward dark-skinned persons may be partly because of the symbolic uses, above. Except for albinos, however, no human is really white, which makes preference for white skin seem especially irrational.
White is symbolic in fantastic literature. In Tolkien's Middle-Earth, you can pretty well tell how a race, or an individual, is going to act, based on how dark they are. Generally, the lighter, the better. Gandalf started out as Gandalf the Grey, and Saruman was Saruman the White, but Saruman fell under the influence of the Dark Lord, and became Saruman of Many Colors, while Gandalf fell to his apparent death in Moria, and came back as Gandalf the White. The White Tree was one of the symbols of the kings of Gondor.
The White Witch in C. S. Lewis' Narnia books was not good, but evil. Through the Looking-Glass has white and red chess-pieces. In Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea books, most of the characters were meant to be dark-skinned. A recent TV movie adaptation mostly changed that, which understandably upset Le Guin.
White is a common last name. There was a Supreme Court Justice named Byron (Whizzer) White. Some variations are also common, such as Weiss, which is white in German. There are several fairly common last names that include White, such as Whiteside and Weissman.
My job, and yours, is to reflect the light, all the light, from the purest Source. May we do so.
Black
Black is the most common color word in English. According to
Wordcount, it is the 356th
most common word, between "care" and "book," which is the 357th most
common word.
There are only 18 verses in the Bible that have this word, considerably less than for some of the color words in previous posts. These include references to the sky when stormy, or when God is angry, to human and horse hair, and to human skin when exposed to the sun.
Easton's Bible Dictionary: "Colour"
The subject of colours holds an important place in the Scriptures. . . .
Black, applied to the hair ( Lev 13:31; Sgs 5:11), the complexion ( Sgs 1:5), and to horses ( Zec 6:2,6). The word rendered "brown" in Gen 30:32 ( R.V., "black") means properly "scorched", i.e., the colour produced by the influence of the sun's rays. "Black" in Job 30:30 means dirty, blackened by sorrow and disease. The word is applied to a mourner's robes ( Jer 8:21; 14:2), to a clouded sky ( 1Ki 18:45), to night ( Mic 3:6; Jer 4:28), and to a brook rendered turbid by melted snow ( Job 6:16). It is used as symbolical of evil in Zec 6:2, 6 and Rev 6:5. It was the emblem of mourning, affliction, calamity ( Jer 14:2; Lam 4:8; 5:10).
Black isn't exactly a color, even though there are black crayons, and black paint. Black is the absence of other colors. If all light is absorbed, the result is black. A black hole is a dense space object that has gravity so strong that the resulting bending of space prevents light from escaping. We can't see a black hole with a telescope, because no light comes from it.
No humans, or any other objects we can see, are pure black. They may be dark, but if they were black, we couldn't see them, because they wouldn't reflect any light. Fantastic writer Gene Wolfe invented a fabric, fuligin, in his Torturer series, that was true black, and could not be seen.
Black is often used to symbolize death, despair, or sin. Black has quite a few unhappy connotations. (Think Black Death, for example.) In Tolkien's Ring books, the bad characters often were black, or wore black. (Black breath was a sickness produced by the ringwraiths, and Mordor was referred to as the black land. Sauron was the dark lord.) It is unfortunate that some of these negative connotations have been associated with dark-skinned people.
Sin is sometimes described as black, needing the crimson blood of Christ to cleanse, and make us white.
Thanks for reading!
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