The Bible is one of the books that has aroused the most interest throughout history to the
present day. However there is one topic that has mostly been neglected and which today
constitutes one of the most emblematic elements of the visual culture in which we live
immersed: the language of colour. Colour is present in the biblical text from its beginning to
its end but it has hardly been studied and we appear to have forgotten that the detailed
study of the colour terms in the Bible is essential to understanding the use and symbolism that
the language of colour has acquired in the literature that has forged European culture and art.
The objective of the present study is to provide the modern reader with the meaning of colour
terms of the lexical families related to the green tonality in order to determine whether they
denote only color and if so what is the coloration expressed or whether together with the
chromatic denotation another reality inseparable from colour underlies along with the
chromatic denotation there is another underlying reality that is inseparable from colour. We
will study the symbolism that which underpins some of these colour terms and which European
culture has inherited. This lexicographical study requires a methodology that allows us to
approach colour not in accordance with our modern and abstract concept of colour but with the
concept of the ancient civilations. This is why the concept of colour that emerges from each of
the versions of the Bible is studied and compared with that found in theoretical reflection in
both Greek and Latin. Colour thus emerges as a concrete reality visible on the surface of
objects reflecting in many cases not an intrinsic quality but their state. This concept has
a reflection in the biblical languages since the terms of colour always describe an entity (in
this sense one can say that they are embodied) and include within them a wide chromatic
spectrum that is they are mostly polysemic. Structuralism through the componential analysis
although providing interesting contributions had at the same time serious shortcomings when it
came to the study of colour. These were addressed through the theoretical framework provided by
cognitive linguistics and some of its tools such as: cognitive domains metonymy and metaphor.
Our study then is one of the first to apply some of the contributions of cognitive
linguistics to lexicography in general and particularly with reference to the Hebrew Greek
and Latin versions of the Bible. A further novel contribution of this research is that the
meaning is expressed through a definition and not through a list of possible colour terms as
happens in dictionaries or in studies referring to colour in antiquity. The definition allows
us to delve deeper and discover new nuances that enrich the understanding of colour in the
three great civilizations involved in our study: Israel Greece and Rome.
