1 Scarlet and Harlots: Seeing Red in the Hebrew Bible Scott B. Noegel University of Washington In this contribution, I ofer a semiotic study of seven terms for the color red in the Hebrew Bible. I contend that such an approach allows us to recognize that the terms convey far more than mere hues in that they appear in texts that cluster references to stigmatized sexual behavior and blood and/or that involve implicitly bloody contexts. I irst examine eleven texts in which the cluster appears, and then sixteen more that employ the cluster in more subtle ways. Aterwards, I ofer an explanation for the cluster by examining the sympathetic and performative aspects of color in the wider Near East – speciically, how red, as the color of blood, encodes notions of protection, fertility, and deilement. Finally, I demonstrate how recognizing this code sheds light on a number of other biblical texts. Scholars of the ancient Near East have long held an interest in the subject of color. Long ago, Hermann Kees, Roland L. Gradwohl, Wolfdietrich Fischer, and Benno Landsberger set the course for future research by deining color terms with precision and by demonstrating that color is more than an aesthetic category.1 Since these seminal works, there has emerged an entire ield of study concerned with the semiotics of colors. Shaped by research primarily in sociol- ogy, psychology, and design, this ield of inquiry has helped us to appreciate both the innate and socially determined ways that colors encode meaning in diferent cultures.2 It is the work of the semiotician to ascertain what sorts of associations colors conjure. 1 See, e.g., Hermann Kees, Farbensymbolik in ägyptischen religiösen Texten. Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaten in Göttingen, Philologisch-Historische Klasse 11 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1943); Roland L. Gradwohl, Die Farben im Alten Testament: eine terminologische Studie. BZAW 83 (Berlin: Töpelmann, 1963); Wolfdietrich Fischer, Farb- und Formbezeichnung in der Sprache der altarabischen Dichtung: Untersuchungen zur Wortbedeutung und zur Wortbildung (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1965); Benno Landsberger, “Über Farben im Sumerisch-Akkadischen,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 21 (1967): 139–73. 2 See, e.g., Umberto Eco, “How Culture Conditions the Colours We See,” in On Signs, ed. M. Blon- sky (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 157–75; Anna Wierzbicka, “he Meaning of Colour Terms: Semantics, Cultures and Cognition,” Cognitive Linguistics 1 (1990): 99–150; Gunther Kress and heo van Leeuwen, “Colour as a Semiotic Mode: Notes for a Grammar of Colour,” Visual Communication 1 (2002): 343–68; Urmas Sutrop, “Towards a Semiotic heory of 8092 HUCA 2017 r56 draft 10 balanced.indd 1 08-Jun-17 1:35:31 PM