Scarlet

This dye was obtained by the Egyptians from the shell-fish Carthamus tinctorius; and by the Hebrews from the Coccus ilicis, an insect which infests oak trees, called kermes by the Arabians. This colour was early known (Gen. 38:28). It was one of the colours of the ephod (Ex. 28:6), the girdle (8), and the breastplate (15) of the high priest. It is also mentioned in various other connections (Josh. 2:18; 2 Sam. 1:24; Lam. 4:5; Nahum 2:3). A scarlet robe was in mockery placed on our Lord (Matt. 27:28; Luke 23:11). "Sins as scarlet" (Isa. 1:18), i.e., as scarlet robes "glaring and habitual." Scarlet and crimson were the firmest of dyes, and thus not easily washed out.

תולעת, Gen. xxxviii, 28; Exod. xxv, 4. This tincture or colour expressed by a word which signifies worm colour, was produced from a worm or insect which grew in a coccus, or excrescence of a shrub of the ilex kind, which Pliny calls “coccus scolecius,” the wormy berry, and Dioscorides terms “a small dry twig, to which the grains adhere like lentiles:” but these grains, as a great author observes on Solinus, “are within full of little worms or maggots, whose juice is remarkable for dying scarlet, and making that famous colour which we admire, and with which the ancients were enraptured.” We retain the name in the cochineal, from the opuntia of America; but we improperly call a mineral colour “vermilion,” which is derived from _vermiculus_, a little worm. The shrub on which the cochineal insect is found is sometimes called the “kermez oak,” from _kermez_, the Arabic word both for the worm and the colour; whence “carmasinus,” the French “cramoisi,” and the English “crimson.”