Riddle of the Biblical Blue

[Christina]

One of the signs of the End Times for the Jew is having all things requied by their Jewish Laws for worship in the Temple one of these little known things in the Western world is a Blue string that is worn on cornor of the priest as well as others Shawls, but this string must be died blue in very specific Way with a specific dye made from an animal called a Hilazon.Which gives on a color of Blue called Tekhelet. Problem is the art of making this dye and what this animal was has been lost for over 1300 years. Recently the art of making the Blue dye has been rediscovered. A sign we are closer to the End of Days?.............. The Riddle of the Biblical Blue or The Quest for the Holy Snail Baruch StermanThe story of the rediscovery of the source for the dye tekhelet - Biblical Blue, is one of intrigue, deception, deduction, and luck. It weaves together clues from archeology,chemistry and Biblical scholarship and its major players include Jewish and Non-Jewish archeologists, marine biologists and chemists, the leader of a Hasidic sect, and the formerChief Rabbi of Israel.The book of Numbers records, "And God spoke to Moses saying,Speak to the Children of Israel and say unto them, that they shall make for themselves fringes on the corners of theirgarments for their generations, And they shall place on the corner fringes a thread of blue. And they shall see it and remember all of my commandments."In ancient times colored dyes were rare and valuable, and the most prized of all were the purple and blue derived from mollusks, literally worth their weight in gold. Porphyra inGreek originally meant shellfish and the word purple applied to the range of colors from purple to blue which were of shellfish origin. These precious dyes were reserved forroyalty; they colored the robes of the kings and princes of Media, Babylon, Egypt and Greece, and to wear them was to identify with the nobility. To the Greeks it was a sign ofhubris as Agamemnon realizes when his wife Clytaemnestra convinces him to walk over the garments of the Gods,"Now since my will was bent to listen to you in this, my feet crush purple as I pass within the hall." The thread of blue on the corners of the Israelites' garments would have beenconspicuous and solicited attention. The association with royalty reminded the Israelite of his duties towards his master, the King of the Universe -"And you shall be to me akingdom of Priests".The Mediterranean coast was the center of the purple dyeing industry in the ancient world. Tyrian purple came from the port of Tyre in what is now southern Lebanon. The Talmudrecords that the hilazon - the mollusk source of the blue dye was to be found "from the ladders of Tyre to Haifa." The Phoenicians (the etymology of their name is from the wordpurple) made their wealth trading in the dyestuff, and dye houses were ubiquitous in the region. Because of its lucrative nature, purple dying slowly came under imperial control. The Romans issued edicts that only royalty could wear purple garments and only imperial dye houses were permitted to manufacture the material. This drove the Jewish tekheletmaking industry underground. A story is recorded in the Talmud of two students carrying tekhelet from Palestine to the Jews in Babylon, who were caught by the eagle (a Talmudic metaphor for Rome) and miraculously escaped death. With the Arab conquest of Palestine (683 AD.) the secret of tekhelet was lost. Purple dying continued to survive sporadically,with a small industry in Constantinople, until that city fell to the Turks on May 29, 1453.Jews continued to wear fringes on their garments but as the Midrash (circa 750 AD) laments, "and now we have no tekhelet, only white, for the tekhelet has been hidden." Thedescription of the hilazon was recorded by the Talmud in various, often contradictory, passages. Its distinguishing features, were that it had a shell, it could be found alongthe northern coast of Palestine, and that its body was similar to the sea. The main characteristics of the tekhelet were its color, which was similar to the sky and sea,the steadfast nature of the dye, that it had to be taken from the hilazon while still alive, and that it was indistinguishable from the counterfeit dye of vegetableorigin, kala ilan - indigo.The rediscovery of the purple dye was due to a chance encounter in 1858. The French zoologist Henri de LacazeDuthiers was on a scientific study sailing from the Minorcanport of Mahon when one of the fishermen took a snail, broke it open and smeared it on his shirt. He boasted that the yellow stain would soon turn red in the sunlight, andLacaze-Duthiers immediately recognized the snail - Thais Haemastoma - as the long lost source of the ancient purple.Rabbi Herzog became aware of the strong evidence for associating one of the Murex species (Trunculus) with the hilazon. He knew of Lacaze-Duthiers' and Friedlander's work. He had readPliny and Aristotle who indicated Brandaris and Trunculus as the source of the ancient purple dyes. He also knew of the archeological finds in Tyre and elsewhere which had un-covered mounds of millions of Murex shells broken in the exact spot necessary to obtain the dyestuff. Yet he could not bring himself to unequivocally identify Trunculus as thesource of tekhelet for two reasons. Firstly, Murex Trunculus, also known as the banded rock Murex Snail, has stripes of brown against an off-white shell, hardly fitting thedescription of the Talmud as domeh l'yam - similar to the sea. Furthermore, the dye obtained from Trunculus is purplish-blue, not pure blue as tradition had maintained.Herzog proposed an alternative snail, Janthina, which has a violet shell and produces a bluish liquid when stimulated,though he never actually dyed with it. There are a number ofdifficulties with the identification of the hilazon with Janthina Snail. The snail lives in the heart of the ocean in floating colonies and washes up on shore very rarely, which would make the snail so scarce as to be unattainable. Itwould also mean that the tekhelet used by the ancient Israelites was different than the blue dye the rest of the world used, and that neither Pliny nor Aristotle knew of it.But the main objection to Janthina is that it does not dye well. The blue-violet color of the dye turns to black- brown after a few days, and the dye is water soluble, hardly thesteadfast blue of true tekhelet.All the evidence points in favor of Murex Trunculus Snail, but what of Rabbi Herzog's objections? As for the first, that it is not similar to the sea, Herzog only saw specimens fromthe British Museum, after they had been cleaned and polished. In its natural state, however, Trunculus is covered with a coat of sea fouling which has a blue-greentint. Furthermore, since everything in the vicinity is covered with the same fouling, it is almost impossible to distinguish between a Trunculus shell and a neighboringrock. In Biblical Hebrew, yam can mean either sea or seabed. The Talmud may have meant that the hilazon is similar to the sea-bed, an exact description of Trunculus in situ.About twenty years ago, Otto Elsner from the Shenkar College of Fibers in Tel Aviv, serendipetously solved the riddle of the tekhelet color. Elsner was researching the methods used by ancient dyers and noticed that while on cloudy days Trunculus dye tended towards purple, on sunny days it was pureblue. The dyes dibromoindigo and indigo are vat dyes, and in order for them to bind tightly to wool, they must first be reduced. Elsner and his colleague Ehud Spanier from Haifa University found that while dibromoindigo is in its reduced state, if it is exposed to ultraviolet light it will determine to pure indigo. Since dying is a very smelly process,it would have been natural to dye outdoors, and in thebright Mediterranean sunlight, ancient dye masters would have quickly learned how to control the color of the Trunculus extract. (Elsner suggested a second possibility for obtaining pure blue from Trunculus - by sex separation - as the males produce primarily indigo while the females yield dibromoindigo. This assumes that the ancient mariners could tell the difference between male and female snails - not a trivial feat since the Trunculus species is hermaphrodite,or imposexual to be more precise, with many females growing male sexual organs during their lifetime. Recent research has cast some doubt as to the statistical significance of sex as a factor in dye type, but Elsner maintains that a difference does exist.)When the dibromoindigo is completely determined to indigo there is no way of telling it from the identical indigo molecule of vegetable origin - kala ilan - as the Talmud states. Does this mean that one could today use synthetic indigo in place of the hilazon based chemical? Most Jewish legal authorities rule not. As is often the case with ritual objects, the source and process are as important as the product. Jewish mystical tradition associates the sun with God's fiery attribute of justice and the sea with His tendency towards kindness. To the ancient Jews of Palestine,tekhelet may have symbolized the mixture of the two; as thesea and sunlight come together to form the blue dye, so tooman survives only through the mixture of both sides of God'spersonality. Over the last few decades, much work has been done to reestablish the tekhelet dying process. Irving Ziderman,from the Israel Fiber Institute has published a number ofarticles describing the scientific aspects and religious implications of the Trunculus dye. Rabbi Herzog's doctorate has finally been published after nearly 80 years. RabbiEliahu Tebger of Jerusalem was the first to actually apply the process according to the prescribed ritual from beginning to end, and prayer shawls - tallitot - with authentic tekhelet can be found in Jerusalem today for the first time in more than 1300 years.....................for those not science mined what they discovered is a change in the molecule occured when the Dye was exposed to sunlight (ultra violet) Rays for about 15 min. it turns blue if it is not exposed to the sun it will only make purple dye. So the anceints used cloudy days to make Purple Dye and the Sunny days to make the blue dye.

 

[samy]

Fascinsting. samy

 

[Geshem]

Ran into a rabbi wearing tzitzit with techelet on Friday. Really surprised me.

 

[Christina]

How cool is that. It never fails to amaze me the little things that are occuring all the time that are coming together.