Unveiling Tekhelet: The Hidden Symbolism In Judaism

Once upon a time, beneath the Mediterranean's deep blue waves, swam a strange creature, the hilazon. According to Jewish tradition, the hilazon is a harbinger of messianic times, the end of the world. But it wasn't just tied to the next world. It also had an earthly value. Cloth dyed in the hilazon's blood was worth 20 times its weight in gold. This dye, a royal blue, was called tekhelet. But over a thousand years ago, this royal blue, tekhelet, disappeared. And ever since then, there's been a mystery. Why did tekhelet disappear? Why is it connected with the end of the world? And which animal is the hilazon? Ancient Hebrew texts give us just a few clues. So the first one is that his body resembles the ocean. Kind of like a dragon or something, you know, some holy lizard or whatever. Sign number two, that the shape, it resembles a fish. Now it has bones and cartilage. It was one of the most precious treasures of antiquity and it was the item of international trade and tribute that one ruler gave to another one when a country was conquered. The fourth one is, it has a, it carries a shell. It has some shell that grows with him. They can be right in front of you. And unless you kind of know what shape you're looking for and maybe even know what movements you're looking for, it's very difficult to find them. It's very difficult to catch them. It has legs and its head. It has its mouth and its eyes and everything. It has legs, like, you know, imagine a person would have legs up here and he wants to catch them. So then I can tell, you know. Like he shoots them out. He shoots them out. He shoots them out and grabs them and grabs his prey. He's got a small amount, it's enough for a few. I don't sell it, I wouldn't sell it. I wouldn't sell it for anything. It's not a question of not even money. It's priceless. It is priceless, absolutely. Number six, it has to have certain parts of his body that should be resembling of a snake. So the blood of the hilazon makes a blue dye called tekhelet. But why is a colour so important? First of all, according to the Bible, God, through Moses, commanded the Israelites to wear a string, a fringe on the corner of their garments. The threads were to be white, except for one, which must be blue. Blue to remind them of the sea, the sea of the sky and the sky of God's holy throne. But this thread was also tied to the end of days. Jews believed that for the Messiah to come, Solomon's temple must be rebuilt in Jerusalem. And the temple priests must wear robes dyed tekhelet blue. I asked Toronto Rabbi Eliezer Bridewitz I mean, some people say that this is a sign of the coming of the Messiah. Well, let's put it this way. Tekhelet is one of the necessary ingredients for the rituals of the temple. You know, the vestments of the priests, especially the high priest, incorporated tekhelet. They could not manufacture without. And therefore, we would expect, as the Messianic age approaches, we would expect that all the necessary ingredients, all the accessories that we'll need will be restored. But I heard of two groups of people trying to restore the necessary ingredients to bring about the end of days. Doing the detective work to crack this 1300 year old mystery. I traveled into the desert outside Jerusalem to meet Baruch Sturman, a man who has dedicated years to finding the hilazon and the dye made from its blood, tekhelet blue. I wanted to know how something so valuable could be lost in the first place. As it turns out, the sheer value of ancient dyes, not just blue, but purple and red as well. Their value as commodities was actually part of their downfall. A downfall that started with the Romans. This was a big business. Very big business. And that's one of the reasons why the tekhelet was eventually lost. The Romans, when they conquered this area, when they conquered Palestine, they made an edict that nobody could be involved in the dye of purple or blue, except for the Roman dye houses, they wanted the money. And also only there, it was illegal to wear purple unless you were a big shot in Rome. Loyal purple, loyal blue. Augustus restricted blue and purple to the ruling classes. Nero decreed only the emperor could wear blue or purple. The Romans passed laws making it harder for people to make the dyes. But tekhelet blue finally disappeared when the Arabs conquered the area in the 7th century. Every time Israel was conquered, whether it be by the Romans or the Christians or the Arabs, one thing they all did, it was massacre the Jews. So the poor Jews in that time could hardly keep any tradition, let alone a secret tradition. And let alone a tradition which had specifically been targeted for eradication because this was associated with the Romans. So there was basically no hope for the secret of tekhelet to be consistent, to be maintained over that period. So whoever still had the secret recipes, the chain was broken. Whatever happened 1300 years ago, invasion, war, migration, the secret was lost. The hilazon became a legend. The trail went cold until the 1880s when a man who was part cowboy, part Sherlock Holmes, and all Polish rabbi, rode out of the north on a quest for the hilazon. So the secret of tekhelet had been lost for 13 centuries. Then in the 1880s, a Polish rabbi called the Redziner Rebbe took up the quest. Today his followers live near Tel Aviv. There I met Rabbi Yitzhak Englard and his brother Shlomo. I asked them what kind of man was the original Redziner Rebbe? I would say he was one of the most brilliant scholars in his generation. He was known to be a genius. He knew astrology, he knew medicine, he knew mathematics, he knew physics, he knew everything. He was an unbelievable person. The Redziner Rebbe was the rabbi for a town called Redzin. Redzin is a place on the border of Russia and Poland and he decided that he needed to find tekhelet. It actually, his goal was messianic. He felt that the temple had to be rebuilt. In order for the temple to be rebuilt, the priests had to have their clothes and you needed tekhelet for that and that was the major reason he decided to set out to look for tekhelet. He's trying to trigger messianic times. Correct. That was his main- To him this is not a fashion statement. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. He had some leads. He went, traveled all the way from Poland to Italy to look in the aquarium at Naples to try to find which sea creature that was the true hilazon. Now, what kind of fish does it resemble? You know, there's millions of types of fish and each fish has a different size and a different figure and a different everything. I can see it now. The Rebbe in Naples standing in front of a fish tank. The sun setting on another day without the hilazon, without the legendary fish whose blood is going to trigger messianic times. Suddenly he looks, he sees, and he knows. He shouts, Eureka! Of a Polish equivalent thereof. Today it's called the cuttlefish. The cuttlefish, sepia officinalis. On one hand, it has a shell. On the other hand, it has fins on the side of its stomach, just like a fish has the fins. That exactly meets the description given through the Talmudic sources. Can the cuttlefish actually be a harbinger of messianic times and the end of days? No matter what you believe the future holds, it's amazing to remember what role color played in our past. Color didn't just shade the ancient world, it shaped it, just like the silk routes and spice trade. People crossed deserts, mountains, seas for a new color. Red often came from ground up beetles. Yellow from cow's urine. Purple from snails. And royal blue, called the chelet in the Bible, came from the blood of the hilazon. There's faith and then there's archaeology. Archaeologists have never found ancient chelet, blue in ancient fabric, but they have found ancient purple made from snails. So if you want to figure out how did they make blue from cuttlefish, you got to look to see how they made purple from snails. I wanted to know more about the actual chemistry of ancient dyes, so I went to see Zvi Koren, a Tel Aviv chemist specializing in ancient colors. He's researched chelet, but he's particularly perplexed by purple. And you're trying to create a catalog of all purple? We're trying to catalog every purple pigment possible. Purple pigment? Purple pigment possible. Thank you. That's what you're trying to do? We're trying to catalog every single purple pigment. One second. Okay, so one sec. We're trying to catalog every single purple pigment in order- Possible. You're going to stop that or not? In order to help archaeologists, when we find, for example, a purple pigment on an archaeological vessel, we want to fingerprint it and therefore know exactly, not just that it's a real purple from a real snail, of course, but from which kind. Zvi hopes his research into ancient purples will throw some light onto chelet on the Gila Zone. I wanted to know how the ancients measured up as chemists. They were great scientists, even though they didn't call themselves that, but they were great empirical dyers and they knew exactly what worked and it was passed down from father to son and kept within a family. It was like a secret, like a kind of guild? It was a guild, certainly within a town and within a particular family. Especially the most secretive of all was the royal purple dyeing, what is known in the Bible as argaman and chelet, a bluish purple, argaman being a reddish purple. Argaman. Argaman, ancient Hebrew for royal purple. Chelet. The Talmud says the chelet must be taken from the Gila Zone while the Gila Zone is still alive. To this day, we still do not know exactly how they performed the dyeing, which must have started about 3,500 years ago by the Phoenicians. Purple. The name Phoenicians means the purple people, since they were famous in antiquity for purple dyeing. It was all accidental, of course. All such great discoveries are accidental. Yeah, that's incredible. Do we know how, I mean, whether you're eating your snail one day and you're flipping it over your shoulder and suddenly it's in a vat and you notice that there's color. I mean, how could they have even... They must have had a number of snails lying around after they fished them, they ate them. As the snails dye, they vomit out the particular glandular extract. And this extract, once it's open to the air, it undergoes a transformation right before your very eyes into from white to yellow to green to blue to purple. It's incredible. So what they must have found as they were leaving these snails around, there could have possibly been a fabric next to it. And all of a sudden, they looked at it and they raised it and said, I can't believe it. Look at this. Moshe, come over here. Look at this. And that's when they discovered, most probably, the purple color. Of course, all this is conjecture, but I believe that this is probably what happened. Wait a minute. All this archaeology and no mention of the cuttlefish and ancient dye making? It's all snails. Could the Reziners have got it wrong after all? What I want to know is this. Can the Reziners be wrong? Can the hilazon be something other than a cuttlefish? Baruch Sturman believes it is something else. Merex trunculus, the snail. He's pointing to the archaeology. Thousands of ancient snails just like these found piled up around Iron Age dye vats. But you're saying, hey guys, there's thousands of these things found in ancient digs. No cuttlefish remains. We know that this was used in dye making. We've found dye installations up at Hoftor and in 19, 20 other places along the coast of Israel, right where the Talmud says the trele dyeing happened. We know that this snail was used for dyeing. We know that this snail can produce a color, right? So the logical argument then says- We're getting closer. I mean, it's gotta be. We're taking a- It looks very fishy. It's very fishy. It's a fishy story, this one. How did the red- So is there something that smells a little fishy about the Redziner's cuttlefish theory? On the one hand, the cuttlefish meets most of the ancient criteria. On the other hand- The archaeologists dug along the coast and they found vast amount of shells of the Murex trunculus. So people say, look, if the Redziner Rebbe was alive today, he would look and say, oh, oops, I goofed. I made a mistake. Because if I was right, they would have found vast amounts of the soft shell of the cuttlefish. They didn't find it. They found the trunculus. If I would find on those shells that I found a sign written, this was trellis, okay. But there were other dyes and other colors being dyed through those years. The Romans were there and they had vast used factories. By the way, the trellis is used only for one threat. And this type of Murex was used to dye entire garments from head to toe for the nobility, of course. And that's why you needed huge amounts of shells. And that's why they found those kinds of shells. Could be if you would check other sites, other places, you'd find what we're using. That archaeology is very nice. It could help you, give you a clue. But to say that what I found is trellis and that was used as trellis, who says? Nobody said that that was a trellis. Maybe that was Argaman, maybe it was purple. Somebody reminded me of a joke that they used to have cellulophones 2000 years ago. How do you know? He says, I have proof. How do you have proof? I did not find any telephone lines. We're digging, no telephone lines were found in all those archaeological sites. So they surely used a cellulophone. Isn't that a good proof? Right? That's good. That's very good. There is no archaeological evidence supporting the cuttlefish. No 2000-year-old cuttlefish shells. But as Yitzhak just pointed out, the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Over a hundred years ago, the Redziner Rebbe was convinced the cuttlefish was the hilazon, and so... He went back to Redzine and set up a factory. Within a year, you had 20,000 people wearing trellis. Wow. All of his followers. They were singing and dancing. But not for long. A hundred years ago, a lot of rabbis immediately came out against the cuttlefish. A tremendous amount of argument broke out over this. Trellis, should you wear trellis? Shouldn't you wear trellis? If you wear the trellis, is it good? Is it bad? Should you be stoned? In Jerusalem, for example, there was giant arguments between those people. As a matter of fact, one person took off a tallit of somebody who wore a trellis, threw it down in the middle of the courtyard in the old city and burned it. The trellis had been gone so long, there was no longer a tradition of wearing it. And the Jewish establishment came out against the Rebbe's discovery. There was this very, very strong, as I said, conservative tendency. And really, in religion, what we find is the exact opposite of what we find in the case of technology. In technology, newer is better. There's progress, there's development. In religion, especially a religion which is based on revelation, we tend to think that with the passage of time, there is a loss of clarity, a loss of precision. So it's not a bad thing that we exercise this caution. There weren't just religious questions. A young student in England named Isaac Herzog had chemistry tests run on the dye. And what he discovered appeared to sink the cuttlefish. Could a chemist delay the Messiah? So after 1300 years, the mystery is solved. The cuttlefish is named as the harbinger of messianic times. The end of days is that much closer. But then a young student in England sends the cuttlefish dye for chemical analysis. Herzog wrote a doctorate on trellit in 1914. And he sent away to Radzin to get their recipes and to get an example, a specimen of the dyed trellit. And he sent it off to chemical laboratories. And those laboratories came back with the result that the blue that was found in the Radzin trellit was synthetic. Now, synthetic means it doesn't come from a living animal. Chemical analysis revealed the Radziner blue to be Prussian blue, a commercially produced painter's color. It turned out that you didn't need the cuttlefish to get the blue. You just needed all the other chemicals in the recipe. It didn't matter that the cuttlefish blood was added. It could be any blood. It could be ox blood, my blood, you still get the blue. Exactly. Ferrocyanide is Prussian blue, which means it comes from iron and cyanide, right? Iron was added. It was added as part of the chemical. So the iron is an integral part. The cyanide comes from the nitrogen and carbon. But that means that anything that has nitrogen and carbon in it, if it's raised to the proper temperature and prepared correctly, would give you the same cyanide that you need in order to- But you still needed the cuttlefish. But you could use cuttlefish. You could use chopped liver. Okay, but that's different. But the point was the chilazon is such an important part of the tradition of the trellit. It can't be that the chilazon was just an incidental ingredient. And you could have just as easily used any other source of protein. I heard people talking about the Prussian blue and everything. The Bible said that we should use blue. It's coming from this fish. It had its reason, right? If it could be done from something else, that's not proof that this wasn't used. Just because you can get it from something else doesn't mean it doesn't invalidate- It doesn't invalidate the cuttlefish. The cuttlefish, right. Because I would give you an example. There is alcohol that is derived from wheat. There's alcohol derived from grapes. Now, if you drink alcohol on Passover from wheat, it is a big sin. But if you drink alcohol that comes from grapes, from fruit, from citrus, it's 100% okay. Our Bible, chemically, they are the same content. The same alcohol, if you put it through a chemist, I don't think you'd be able to make a difference between A and B. Just the Torah, we do not understand. Everything is a question for where it comes. So which legendary sea creature is the biblical chilazon? I'm not counting anyone out yet. Ancient clues seem to indicate that it's the cuttlefish. But the archeology seems to support the lowly little snake. The chemistry, well, I haven't figured that one out yet. What I do know is that once we find the chilazon, and once we've recovered that biblical blue, the techelet, we will have brought things that much closer to the end of days.