Cultural unit red in the Old Testament

Abstract

The paper describes and analyzes the full presence of red in the Old Testament – in Hebrew and translations. The approach is interdisciplinary, which includes: the treatment of color as a cultural unit, according to the idea of Umberto Eco; lexical and contextual semantics; examining Basic Color Terms (BCT – adjective, noun, verb), Prototype Terms (PT blood and fire), Rival Terms of Prototypes (RT), e.g. ruby; Ters for Basic Features of the Prototypes (TBFP burn); translation as a criterion and semiotic value; semiotic osmosis (semio-osmosis) as a process that aims equivalence between Hebrew PT and TBFP; semio-osmosis and accommodation; cultural and linguistic context; the interplay of old information (topic/theme) – new information (focus/rheme); rhizome of Hebrew root Aleph-Dalet-Mem deriving untranslatable set of words; well-structured and always translatable terms for PTs. Some links between the Old and New Testaments based on red color are explicit.

Keywords

• color
• cultural unit
• hebrew
• rhizome
• semiotic osmosis