Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
Genesis 37:3
A coat of many colours. Modern scholarship increasingly favors a long-sleeved robe, not a rainbow garment.
Genesis 37:3, in every translation this tool compares.
Picture a phrase translators have guessed at for two thousand years without ever finding a second example to confirm the guess. That is ketonet passim. The colorful coat is a famous, beloved image; it may also simply be wrong.
Because the single most famous piece of clothing in the Bible is named by a Hebrew phrase whose precise meaning is genuinely uncertain, and most specialists today think many colours is very likely the wrong guess, favoring instead a long garment with sleeves, an entirely different, if less colorful, kind of favoritism.
Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age: and he made him a coat of many colours.
The King James reads coat of many colours, following the Septuagint and Vulgate's variegated. Modern versions increasingly read a long robe with sleeves or an ornamented robe, following medieval and modern Hebraists who connect passim to pas, the palm of the hand or sole of the foot, suggesting a garment reaching to the hands and feet rather than one displaying colors.
כְּתֹנֶת פַּסִּים ketonet passim · H3801 + H6446
Passim occurs in this exact phrase only twice in the Hebrew Bible, here and at 2 Samuel 13:18-19 describing the royal garment worn by unmarried princesses, including Tamar, before her own assault. Neither occurrence confirms colors; the connection to pas, palm or sole, suggests a garment with long sleeves and a long hem, marking its wearer as someone who does not do manual labor, a mark of privileged status rather than a rainbow of dyed cloth.
English many colours is vivid, specific, and has anchored centuries of art and storytelling, but the Hebrew phrase behind it is genuinely uncertain, and the strongest linguistic evidence, its only other biblical occurrence describing royal children's clothing, points toward a long, sleeved, privileged garment rather than a colorful one.
A translation tradition this old and this beloved can still rest on a guess. Before trusting a famous image, check whether the Hebrew phrase behind it has a confirmed meaning or only an inherited one, especially when the word recurs elsewhere in a context that points a different direction.
Coat of many colours preserves the image nearly every reader already carries and is not disprovable outright. A long robe with sleeves better fits the word's only other biblical occurrence and its likely connection to pas, and shifts the story's point from bright dye to Joseph being marked as exempt from a laborer's life, a distinction his brothers, who did that labor, would have resented just as sharply.
- The only other occurrence, describing royal children's clothing: 2 Samuel 13:18-19
- Proposed connection to pas, palm/sole, suggesting long sleeves and hem: Rabbi David Kimhi and modern lexicons
- Septuagint poikilos, variegated, behind the Vulgate and King James rendering
