Hello brothers and sisters,
Everybody knows the coat.
You knew it before you could read. It was on the felt board in Sunday school, it was in the picture Bible your grandmother gave you, and if you grew up anywhere near a community theater you have probably sat through a musical about it.
The coat of many colors. Rainbow stripes, patchwork panels, the whole thing loud enough to make eleven brothers murderous.
But there’s a problem.
Nobody actually knows what Joseph was wearing.
I don’t mean that as a tease. I mean it as a plain statement of the philological situation. The Hebrew phrase behind that famous coat occurs five times in the entire Bible, all of them in two stories, and scholars have been arguing about what it means for the better part of three thousand years without landing anywhere.
The rabbis disagree with each other. The Greek translators disagree with each other. The Latin disagrees with the Greek. Your NKJV and your NRSV disagree with each other, on the same verse, in your own hands.
Look:
Genesis 37:3 (NKJV): “Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age. Also he made him a tunic of many colors.”
Genesis 37:3 (NRSV): “Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his children, because he was the son of his old age; and he had made him a long robe with sleeves.”
Read those again. One says the coat was colorful. The other says nothing whatsoever about color and instead tells you about its length and its sleeves. These are not two ways of saying the same thing. These are two different garments.
And here is why I find this so worth our time. This is not a case where one tradition got it right and the other got it wrong. This is a case where a genuinely obscure Hebrew phrase produced a whole family of ancient readings, each one catching a real facet of a garment nobody living has ever seen, and the Greek tradition preserved something the Hebrew alone would never have told us.
This is the first of three parts. In this one we are going to sit inside the problem: the Hebrew, the rabbis, and the room full of ancient Greek translators all staring at the same two words and reaching for different answers. Part 2 will take the Greek word itself and trace it through the whole of Scripture and beyond. Part 3 will follow it into the New Testament, where it turns up in a place that will make the whole study worth it.
Let’s dig in.
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The Two Words
Here is the phrase at the heart of everything:
כְּתֹנֶת פַּסִּים (ketonet passim)
The first word is not the problem. כְּתֹנֶת (ketonet) means tunic, coat, or shirt. It is a common enough word. It shows up for the garments the Lord made for Adam and Eve in Genesis 3:21, and for the priestly tunics in Exodus 28. It is an ordinary piece of clothing worn against the body. The Greeks borrowed the word, or something very close to it, and got χιτών (chitōn). English eventually got “cotton” out of the same family.
The problem is פַּסִּים (passim).
It occurs in the Hebrew Bible only in this phrase, and the phrase occurs only five times:
Genesis 37:3, when Jacob gives the coat to Joseph
Genesis 37:23, when the brothers strip it off him
Genesis 37:32, when they send it back to Jacob soaked in goat’s blood
2 Samuel 13:18, describing what Tamar was wearing
2 Samuel 13:19, when Tamar tears it
That is the complete evidence. Five occurrences, two narratives, and both narratives end with the wearer stripped, ruined, and thrown away. There is no third story that gives us a control. There is no legal text that defines it. There is no prophet who uses it in a way that clarifies the sense. It appears, and it appears only here, and then it is gone.
When a word occurs this rarely, translators do what translators have always done. They reason from the root, they reason from cognates in nearby languages, and they reason from what would make sense in the scene. And then, inevitably, they disagree.
The singular form is פַּס (pas). In later Aramaic and in rabbinic Hebrew, pas means the flat of the hand or the sole of the foot. That is the strongest lead anyone has. If pas means palm and sole, then a ketonet passim would be a tunic that reaches to the palms and the soles. A long robe. With sleeves.
Which is exactly where your NRSV got its rendering.
But that is a lead, not a proof. The Aramaic evidence is later than Genesis, and building a translation on a later cognate is a legitimate move that can also go badly wrong.
Which is why not everybody made it.
The Rabbis Could Not Agree Either
I want to spend real time here, because I think Christians often assume that Jewish tradition simply knows what the Hebrew means and we are the ones who lost the thread.
On this phrase, that assumption is not correct. The Jewish interpretive tradition is every bit as divided as ours, and watching them work is genuinely instructive.
Rashi (eleventh century, France) says the word describes the material, not the pattern. His comment on Genesis 37:3 reads:
פסים. לְשׁוֹן כְּלִי מֵילָת, כְּמוֹ כַּרְפַּס וּתְכֵלֶת, וּכְמוֹ כְּתֹנֶת הַפַּסִּים דְּתָמָר וְאַמְנוֹן
Passim: a term for an article of fine wool, like karpas and blue in Esther 1:6, and like the ketonet passim of Tamar and Amnon in 2 Samuel 13:18.
So for Rashi the coat was not necessarily long, and it was not necessarily patterned. It was expensive. Made of costly fine wool, the sort of fabric hanging in a Persian king’s palace. A luxury item, given to a seventeen-year-old shepherd boy who did not need one.
Rashi then does something I love, and offers a second reading from the Midrash Aggadah alongside the first without pretending the two must be reconciled. In that reading, the letters of פסים are taken as the initials of Joseph’s coming troubles: פוֹטִיפַר (Potiphar), סוֹחֲרִים (the merchants), ישְׁמְעֵאלִים (the Ishmaelites), מדְיָנִים (the Midianites). The very name of the garment spells out the chain of hands he will pass through.
Now, that is midrash and not Scripture. Also, remember that midrash is doing something other than lexicography. But notice what it senses. The coat is not just a gift. The coat is the beginning of the descent. The rabbis felt that in their bones, and they wrote it into the letters.
The others spread out from there.
Bereshit Rabbah 84 takes the palm-and-sole route: a tunic whose sleeves reach the wrist. Rashbam, Ibn Ezra, and the Baalei Tosafot go the same direction, a long garment coming down to the palms of the hands. Lekach Tov extends it to the feet.
Radak (David Kimchi) reads passim as striped, and notes the plural form, which some later commentators took as pointing toward panels or patchwork. Ibn Janach also lands on striped, and elsewhere suggests silk. Rav Saadiah Gaon likewise reads it as silk, a material claim rather than a pattern claim.
Ibn Ezra (who, notice, appears on two different lists), Bachya, and Ramban in his comment on Exodus 28:2 read it as embroidered.
And the Aramaic translations split as well. Targum Onkelos essentially declines to solve it, carrying the Aramaic cognate פסי straight across and leaving the reader exactly where the Hebrew left him. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan commits, using מְצוּיָר (metzuyar), which carries the sense of pictured, figured, or decorated. Something with images worked into it.
Count the options. Fine wool. Silk. Striped. Embroidered. Pictured. Long to the wrists. Long to the ankles. Patchwork.
Eight readings. Not one of them foolish. Every one of them from a serious reader working carefully with the same two words.
I want you to hold onto that, because when we get to the Greek in a moment, somebody is going to want to say that the Septuagint translators simply guessed. They did guess, in a sense. So did everyone. Guessing responsibly is what you do when the evidence is genuinely thin, and the honest thing is to admit that this is what is happening rather than to pretend the Hebrew was ever obvious.
The Room Full of Greek Translators
Now we come to our home ground.
Sometime in the early to mid third century before Christ, in Alexandria, a Jewish translator sat down with the Hebrew of Genesis 37 and had to decide what Joseph was wearing. He could not punt. Onkelos could carry the word over into Aramaic because Aramaic and Hebrew are cousins and the transliteration would at least look like something. Greek offers no such escape. He had to pick a Greek word.
He picked this one:
ποικίλος (poikilos), and in Genesis 37:3 the accusative form ποικίλον agreeing with χιτῶνα (chitōna: tunic).
Genesis 37:3 (LXX): ἐποίησεν δὲ αὐτῷ χιτῶνα ποικίλον.
Genesis 37:3 (LXX, Brenton): “And Jacob loved Joseph more than all his sons, because he was to him the son of old age; and he made for him a coat of many colours.”
He used it again at 37:23, when the brothers strip him, and again at 37:32, when the bloodied garment comes back to Jacob. Three times, consistently. τὸν χιτῶνα τὸν ποικίλον. The coat is named by that adjective every time it appears in the story.
Now, I am going to say something here that I will spend all of Part 2 unpacking, so take it for now as a promise rather than an argument. ποικίλος does not primarily mean “many-colored.”
It can mean that. Color is inside the range. But the root sense of the word is closer to intricate, variegated, or elaborately worked. It comes from an ancient root meaning to cut, to stitch, to embroider, and by extension to mark or to paint. The same root gives Latin pingo and pictus, and eventually English picture and pigment. In classical Greek the word describes cunningly wrought metalwork, elaborate songs, complicated oracles, and clever many-sided people. Homer uses it of Odysseus.
So when the translator reached for ποικίλος, he was not necessarily saying “this coat was red and green and yellow.” He was saying “this coat was elaborate. Intricate. Worked.” Which sits remarkably close to Ramban’s embroidered, and to Pseudo-Jonathan’s figured, and honestly not that far from Rashi’s fine wool either.
The English “coat of many colours” is a narrowing that happened downstream, in Latin and then in English, of a Greek word that was always broader than color. We will get into how that narrowing happened.
But he was not the only Greek translator to weigh in.
Aquila and Symmachus Disagree With the Septuagint, and With Each Other
In the second century after Christ, two Jewish translators produced fresh Greek versions of the Hebrew Scriptures. Aquila, working around 130 A.D., was a fierce literalist who tried to reproduce Hebrew structure in Greek almost word for word.
Symmachus, working later in the same century, was the stylist of the group, prized for elegant idiomatic Greek. Both of their versions were later set alongside the Septuagint by Origen in his great six-column comparison, the Hexapla.
Both of them looked at ketonet passim and declined the Septuagint’s answer.
Aquila went with the palm-and-sole logic and produced a word built on ἀστράγαλος (astragalos), the ankle bone. A tunic reaching to the ankles.
Symmachus went with χειριδωτός (cheiridōtos), from χειρίς, a sleeve. A tunic furnished with sleeves.
Neither of them says one word about color or ornament. Both of them are describing the shape of the garment, not its surface.
And here is something worth knowing about how we know any of this. Aquila’s and Symmachus’s versions are lost. What survives comes to us in fragments: quotations in the church fathers, notes scribbled in the margins of manuscripts, and secondary translations. In this particular case, our witness is Jerome, in his Hebrew Questions on Genesis, where he pauses over this very verse and reports what the other Greek translators did:
Pro varia tunica, Aquila interpretatus est tunicam ἀστραγάλειον, id est, tunicam talarem. Symmachus, tunicam manicatam.
“For a many-colored tunic, Aquila rendered it a tunic ἀστραγάλειον, that is, an ankle-length tunic. Symmachus, a sleeved tunic.”
I want to be straight with you about a limit here. The exact Greek form Aquila used is not fully settled. Jerome’s text transmits ἀστραγάλειον. Other scholarly sources cite ἀστράγαλον or ἀστραγάλων. Sorting that out requires Field’s collection of the Hexaplaric fragments or the Göttingen critical apparatus, and I do not have access to either. So I will tell you what everyone agrees on, which is the sense: Aquila was describing a garment that reached the ankles. The precise form of the word he used is a genuine open question, and I would rather flag it than quietly pick one and sound more certain than I am.
What I find remarkable is that we have this at all. A fourth-century Latin scholar, working in Bethlehem, jotted down what two second-century Jewish translators did with two Hebrew words, and because he did, we can still hear their voices seventeen centuries later. That is not nothing.
It’s a chain of careful people refusing to let a detail drop.
And Jerome himself, when he came to translate the Vulgate, went a third direction: tunicam polymitam, a tunic woven of many threads. Then at 2 Samuel 13:18 he used talaris, ankle-length.
Even Jerome, one man, did not use the same solution in both books.
A Word About Manuscripts
I want to add a caution here, because this is the kind of study where a certain sort of claim tends to float around, and I would rather you be equipped than impressed.
You will sometimes see it said online that a particular ancient codex reads something different at Genesis 37:3. Before you accept any claim of that shape, on this verse or any other, it is worth asking a simple question: is that manuscript actually extant at that verse?
This is something I misspoke on when I first looked into it, so I think it’s important to state this plainly.
Codex Vaticanus, for example, is one of the great fourth-century witnesses to the Greek Bible. It is a magnificent manuscript. It is also missing its opening leaves. Everything from Genesis 1:1 through Genesis 46:28 was lost, and the gap was filled in by a fifteenth-century hand many centuries later.
Which means Vaticanus has no fourth-century testimony about Joseph’s coat at all. Not a variant reading. Not a different word. Nothing. The pages are gone.
That is not a knock on Vaticanus. It’s a manuscript that has been incredible valuable to Septuagint scholarship. But manuscripts are physical objects, and physical objects get damaged. And this matters enormously for how we argue. “This codex reads X” and “this codex is silent here” are completely different claims, and the difference is invisible unless somebody checks.
The checking is most of the work of this type of scholarship.
The Both/And
So where does all of this leave us?
Here is where I land, and I would genuinely welcome you disagreeing with me and going to look for yourself.
I do not think we have to choose.
But I want to be careful about how I say that, because there’s a tidy version of this argument that I think is false, and I nearly made it myself.
The tidy version goes like this: the Hebrew tells you the coat’s shape and the Greek tells you its texture, so put them together and you have the whole garment. Long, sleeved, and ornate. Problem solved.
It’s a satisfying sentence. But it’s a statement that simply does not survive an honest reading of the text.
Because we just spent a full section watching careful readers pull פַּסִּים in four different directions at once. Fine wool. Silk. Striped. Embroidered. Reaching to the wrists. Reaching to the feet. The palm-and-sole cognate is the single strongest lead anybody has, and I think it is a good one.
But a strong lead is not a definition.
If I turn around now and announce that the Hebrew “means” extent, I have quietly thrown away every reading that says otherwise, including Rashi’s, in order to make my two traditions fit together neatly.
That is not the both/and. That is arithmetic dressed up as theology.
So let me say what I actually think the two traditions preserved.
The Hebrew preserved the question. It kept the phrase exactly as it stood, opaque and unresolved, refusing to smooth it into something a reader could take at a glance. Every one of those eight readings is still live in the Masoretic Text because the Masoretic Text has not chosen between them. That looks like a loss until you consider the alternative. A tradition that had “helpfully” clarified the phrase somewhere along the way would have handed us one answer and destroyed seven. Instead the strangeness of the words was guarded, letter by letter, for three thousand years by people who could easily have fixed it and did not.
The Greek preserved answers. Three of them, and they are not guesses in the way ours would be. These are decisions made by native speakers of the receiving language, working centuries closer to the world that produced the garment, who had to commit because their language gave them no way to hedge. The Septuagint says elaborately worked. Aquila says ankle-length. Symmachus says sleeved. That is not noise. It’s a testimony about how the phrase was actually heard by people who were more than two thousand years closer to Genesis than we are.
Now hold those two together.
If we had only the Greek, we would never know there was a puzzle here at all. We would read ποικίλος and picture something ornate and move on, never suspecting that the underlying Hebrew was one of the strangest phrases in the Torah. The Greek is clear precisely because it is a translation, and translations trade ambiguity for clarity. That trade always costs something.
And if we had only the Hebrew, we would have the puzzle and nothing else. An opaque word, a shelf of medieval commentators arguing, and no witness at all from antiquity telling us what the phrase sounded like to someone who lived nearer to it.
Neither tradition is deficient. They are doing different jobs. One guarded the difficulty. The other recorded the readings. And I would not surrender either, because losing the first would make us overconfident and losing the second would leave us with nothing but our own speculation.
Here is the thing worth noticing, though. For all that uncertainty about the fabric, the story itself is not remotely unclear about what the coat did. Genesis does not need us to solve passim in order to make its point, because it tells us the effect directly: the brothers saw that their father loved him more, and they hated him and could not speak peaceably to him. Whatever that garment was, they read it instantly, and they read it correctly.
The meaning of the coat comes from the narrative. Only the appearance of it comes from the lexicon. And we have far more of the first than we do of the second.
I believe the survival of both traditions, side by side, is not an accident of transmission. I believe it is providence. One holding the question open, the other holding what the ancients answered, and neither one able to do the other’s work.
One Thread to Hold
Before we close, I want to leave you with something that will not pay off until Part 2, because I think you will enjoy watching for it.
Go back seven chapters, to Genesis 30. Jacob is still working for Laban. He is peeling white stripes into fresh rods and setting them in the watering troughs, working out his wages from a father-in-law who has cheated him ten times over.
The Greek of that chapter uses ποικίλος. It uses it of the peeled rods. It uses it of the flocks that were born. And in Genesis 31:8, when Jacob recounts the terms Laban kept changing, the Greek reads: τὰ ποικίλα ἔσται σου μισθός. The poikila will be your wages.
Jacob’s wages. Jacob’s fortune. The entire basis of the wealth he carried out of Paddan-aram.
And then, seven chapters later, that same man takes his favorite son and dresses him in a χιτῶνα ποικίλον.
A Greek-speaking reader working straight through Genesis would hear it. Same word, four times, across one man’s life. His method. His flocks. His wages. His son.
Hold that. We will come back to it.
Weighing What We Cannot See
I said at the top that nobody knows what Joseph was wearing, and I meant it. But I want to end somewhere other than uncertainty, because uncertainty is not actually the point of this.
Here is what strikes me.
The Bible tells us, in extraordinary detail, about a garment. It tells us in Hebrew and in Greek and in Aramaic and in Latin. Generations of the most careful readers who ever lived bent over two words and gave their lives to getting it right. And after all of that, we still cannot say with confidence whether it was striped or embroidered, silk or fine wool, ankle-length or wrist-length.
But here’s the point that I want you to take to heart: it really doesn’t matter. Not for the story.
Because what the coat did is perfectly clear in every language it has ever been written in. It marked a boy out. It told eleven brothers, without a word being spoken, that their father’s heart was not evenly divided. And it went into a pit with him and came out of it covered in the blood of an animal that never touched him.
The rabbis caught that. That is what the acronym reading is reaching for. The garment that announced Joseph’s favor is the same garment that carried him into slavery, and its name spells out the hands he would pass through on the way down.
There is a hard mercy in that, and I think it is worth sitting with. The gift that Jacob gave in love was the instrument of Joseph’s ruin. And the ruin was the road to Egypt, and Egypt was the road to the granaries, and the granaries were how the covenant family survived a famine that should have ended them.
Joseph said it himself at the end, when he had the power to do anything he wanted to the men who stripped that coat off his back: “But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, in order to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive” (Genesis 50:20, NKJV).
The coat is a small thing. Two words we cannot fully translate. A garment nobody has seen in thirty-five centuries.
And the Lord wove the whole rescue of a family through it.
We do not always get to know what the fabric was. But we do get to know Who was working the loom.
Next time we take ποικίλος itself and follow it everywhere it goes. Through the tabernacle. Through Ezekiel. Through Jacob’s flocks. And out the other side into a New Testament where the color drains out of the word entirely and something far stranger takes its place.
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I can remember hearing this story when I was growing up. My dad, a pastor referred to the coat as “a coat of great price”. It was the way he had been taught it.
After reading this, fantastic job on the scholarship, I suddenly realized that his “different” way of describing the coat wasn’t out of place, but fits in with what you are saying. Unfortunately dad is gone, so I can’t go back and ask him about this.
PS. Thank you for the hard work you have put in. My daughter who has a doctorate in near middle eastern biblical studies (translator) has been impressed with your articles I have shared. Keep on doing what you are doing. Thank you
I sent her a copy of this article.