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© 2017 John D. Brey. 

In the course of about five or six short essays last year, I composed what, when combined, became just one large essay on Techelet. Not only did I thoroughly debunk the epispasmic cover-up of the true nature of the color ("techelet"), but in the process of debunking the current ideas being taught in modern quarters, I clarified the important doctrines that are intertwined within the nature of the color; doctrines that undermines the very foundation of many modern religious cults.

Since the essay is comprehensive in its treatment of the color, its source, purpose, and production (I even manufactured the color myself), it would be the last thing I'd want to do on a late summer Sunday to reopen that topic to the yawns and nose scratching it endure in its original incarnation. Nevertheless, in more recent studies, I happened upon something I missed when techelet was the topic of discussion; something so supportive of my take on techelet that it can't be ignored.

The late Professor of Biblical Studies at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Menahem Haran, is best known for his Temples and Temple Service in Ancient Israel. In that seminal work, Professor Haran dissects many of the intricacies of temple worship and practice. As fate would have it, he points out some things about the color techelet that are startlingly supportive of the theory found in the essay, Techelet, which posits that the color is produced through the manufacture of colloidal-gold as a dye which is thereafter mixed with the blood of a sacrificial animal to produce the sacerdotal "purple" that's the priestly color par excellent.

But if techelet is "purple," then why does modern Judaism associate techelet with blue? ----- Modern Judaism associates techelet with blue because blue is the color of divinity. The sky. Heaven. The sea. While crimson or scarlet is the color of earth, adamah, i.e., Adam's blood, the blood of living things. And never the two should mix.

In its harsh rejection of the divine-incarnation doctrines (mixing heaven and earth) being taught by those Christian/Jews who were made heretics by their brethren during the first few centuries of the common era, modern Judaism was forced to teach that techelet, far from combining blue (heaven) and crimson or scarlet (earth, living organisms), making purple, it instead represented only heaven, divinity, "blue."

For modern Judaism techelet is the color representing divinity (blue), God, while crimson and scarlet represent living organisms (perhaps crimson representing land organisms and scarlet sea-creatures). It must be blue because like gold itself, the color blue represents heaven, the divine, divinity. . . And God forbid heaven and earth be mixed to produce purple.

Modern Judaism teaches that techelet comes from the blood of a sea-creature, snail or mollusk. And yet no one's been able to find the snail or mollusk that produces a color acceptable to Jewish halakha. The theory posited here is that even as Moses hammered and powdered the golden-calf which he thereafter mixes with water, after which he "waters" Israel, sprinkles them with the dye, so too, Moses passes down the recipe for the colloidal-gold dye to the producers of the sacerdotal garments to be worn by the Levitical priesthood.

Prior to the golden-calf fiasco all of Israel were designated priests of the covenant. There was no specialized priesthood peopled only by Levites. So fittingly when Moses tells the Israelites of God's anger with them, he's in effect divorced himself from them, they take off the priestly garments colored with the colloidal-gold dye mixed with the blood of a sacrificial animal (producing "purple").

After the golden-calf, Moses establishes the specialized priesthood of the Levites such that they, and they alone, are allowed to wear the colloidal-gold and animal blood that's the techelet-imbued priestly garment. Professor Haran notes that the priestly garments are composed of shatnez (wool and linen) which is a material forbidden by law unless this shatnez is dyed with techelet. The color techelet is the holy elixir that seemingly sanctifies shatnez allowing the mixing of unlike properties in a garment worn by a priest.

Rabbi Samson R. Hirsch points out that since wool is from the animal kingdom, while linen is from the plant kingdom, the law of shatnez is most likely about the prohibition on mixing organisms from unlike kingdoms. He goes so far as to parallel shatnez with the prohibition on Jewish mixed marriages, implying that the Jew is a whole other species than the Gentile.

Ironically, since techelet allows the transgressing of the law of shatnez, within Rabbi Hirsch's own logic it would allow the mixing of unlike species, even Jew and Gentile (2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15), implying that the techelet-wearing high priest represents not a Jew or a Gentile, but some human organism that either preexisted the division into Jew and Gentile (perhaps prelapse Adam), or else a "divine-man" unthinkable within traditional Jewish understanding of the concept of lawful duality.

Since after the destruction of the temple the Jewish priesthood is impossible, it's impossible for the religious-minded Jew, who is not a member of the priesthood, to conceive of the meaning of a dye that allows the transgressing of the law of shatnez for the priesthood. Understanding such a thing requires someone who is part of the priesthood.

And right on time come those Christian/Jews who were made heretics by their Jewish brothers and who spoke of the implementation of the original plan for a universal priesthood (opposed to the specialized Levitical priesthood) through a dyeing immersion into the unique blood of a person whom they considered not only God's Messianic son, but whose blood they claimed so transgressed the law of shatnez ---which their Jewish peers were wont to defend to the death ----that having been dyed in that elixir they were no longer subject to the ultimate penalty for breaking the law of shatnez, or any other law: death.

The Christian/Jews of the first century implied that the blood of Jesus of Nazareth was "purple" since it mixed divinity and humanity in the ultimate transgression of the law of shatnez. The ringleader of these heretics, Saul of Tarsus, went so far as to imply that baptism in the blood of Jesus of Nazareth was akin not just to dying one's garments with techelet, but with dying ones very flesh and blood techelet. -----The person so died was no longer a Jew or a Gentile, nor even a male or a female.

According to Paul, such a person was a new creature died in the Christ who transgressed all former distinctions even to include the ultimate distinction between the living and the dead. The person died in Christ would never taste death since the distinction between life and death, the ultimate heart and soul of law of shatnez (and the law in general), has been dissolved in the unification of the primary polar-opposition of creation: God and man.

The Christian/Jew became the living embodiment of the garment dyed with techelet. Professor Haran says (p. 167):

The [high priest's] ephod is made of the sacred mixture---all kinds of wool with linen, hoseb workmanship, and hence it seems to be similar to the paroket-veil or the lower curtains. . . the fabric contains gold as well as woollen and linen thread [shatnez]. What is more, gold becomes the predominant ingredient, outstripping in quantity all the other materials woven into this fabric.

From here, Professor Haran delves into the heart and soul of the matter at hand. -----How and why does the gold "woven" (through a "cunning" process: hoseb) into the techelet fabric allow the fabric to transcend the law of shatnez? -----It probably couldn't or wouldn't unless something about the techelet addresses the problem of "mixing" unlike things?

Which is where the strange word "hoseb" (translated "cunning work" in KJV) comes into focus. And where Professor Haran's painstaking attention to detail reaps its reward:

Furthermore, when the text wishes to explain how the gold was combined with the threads of wool and linen, it notes that the gold sheets were "beaten out and cut into cords to work into the blue and into the purple and into the crimson stuff and into the fine twined linen" (Exod. 39:3). The repetition of the preposition "into" betok, seems to indicate that the gold cords were not assumed to be worked into a ready-made fabric, but woven together with every individual thread of wool or linen from the very beginning, the ephod thus being prepared from these partly golden threads.

Professor Haran is backing slowly and carefully into the revelation his examination reveals. The gold isn't woven into a material that's already manufactured. The gold seems to be woven into every individual thread before the thread is used for the fabric.

Therefore, neither hammered-out work nor gold overlay is involved here, nor even gold embroidery. And yet the gold becomes the main element in this garment, producing its dominant colour and constituting the principal part of its weight. In essence it can therefore be regarded as a golden ephod . . ..

Because of the impeccable logic employed, Professor Haran notes that the priestly ephod should be considered a "golden" garment; gold should be the primary color associated with the garment. It's in all respects a gold product. . . But is that really true? . . .Or is techelet the primary color? Perhaps both (p. 169):

It is worth mentioning that the gold which is woven into the high priest's garments is also mostly pure (cf. above, sect. 9). "Pure gold", zahab tahor, . . . can only be evident when it is cast or at least used in a considerable concentration ---not when it is cut into fine cords and woven in a fabric. Anyhow, the high priest's garments are equivalent in this respect to the inner furniture [pure gold], not to the planks and pillars [a gold alloy].

As is often the case when truth and orthodoxy clash, Professor Haran is caught on the horns of the serious dilemma. A dilemma that's solved by the essay Techelet. The cloth dyed techelet is considered not merely "gold" like the planks and the pillars, but "pure gold," zahab tahor. -----And yet that can't be? Since presumably the gold is interwoven with the thread in a way that eliminates the possibility of the cloth being "pure" unalloyed, gold. The cloth, separating the strands of gold, make calling, or considering the whole cloth "pure gold" impossible.

Nevertheless, it’s the case, as Professor Haran points out, that the cloth in which the high priest is clothed is considered "pure gold," zahab tahor.

Dying the threads with colloidal-gold so infuses the wool and linen with gold that the wool is no longer wool, and the linen is no longer linen. The dye enters into the very keratin of the wool in a manner such that after the process the gold is utterly unified with the wool.  They're not gold and wool any longer. They're pure goldwool. Ditto for the linen.

Shatnez is still in effect. It's just that the priestly garment no longer has wool or linen. It has goldwoollinen. Which isn't really an alloy, or a mixture, nor even a unity. It's a new hupostasis unlike anything that's ever existed. 

Ergo the glory, the tiferet, associated with the priestly garment. And thus the power of this particular garment, and the color purple, to transgress all former disunity and duality, producing not just a new unity, but a new creation, which, when worn, renders the wearer neither Jew nor Gentile, neither male nor female, neither clothed, nor naked. Nor even an alloy of any of these former dualities. The garment becomes part and parcel of its wearer even as the gold in techelet so infuses the organic material ---which it thereafter becomes ----that all former duality fades into oblivion.