This is probably old hat to you classicists, but it was new to me. Are there good articles on the use of color in Koine?What is the color of honey, and "faces pale with fear"? If you're Homer--one of the most influential poets in human history--that color is green. And the sea is "wine-dark," just like oxen...though sheep are violet. Which all sounds...well, really off. Producer Tim Howard introduces us to linguist Guy Deutscher, and the story of William Gladstone (a British Prime Minister back in the 1800s, and a huge Homer-ophile). Gladstone conducted an exhaustive study of every color reference in The Odyssey and The Iliad. And he found something startling: No blue! Tim pays a visit to the New York Public Library, where a book of German philosophy from the late 19th Century helps reveal a pattern: across all cultures, words for colors appear in stages. And blue always comes last. Jules Davidoff, professor of neuropsychology at the University of London, helps us make sense of the way different people see different colors in the same place. Then Guy Deutscher tells us how he experimented on his daughter Alma when she was just starting to learn the colors of the world around, and above, her.
I didn't find blue in the Greek New Testament, but I did find it in the Septuagint, e.g. a hyacinth-colored covering of skin for the Ark of the Covenant. I wonder how they would dye skin to get it to be that color. On a quick read, the word ὑακίνθινος always seems to be used to describe liturgical items made of skin or cloth or ceremonial clothing in the Septuagint, never to describe the color of the sky or the sea.