spotted or patched: covered with patches of a second color, or with pieces of material set into the surface
TranslatabilityPartialCertaintyStrong
Hebrew uses one word here for things English splits apart. It describes a surface broken up by patches: patches of another color on an animal's hide, or patches of material set into cloth and leather. The word is never used of an action someone is performing; it always describes the finished look of the thing.
Most of its appearances sit inside one story, the wage bargain between Jacob and Laban in Genesis 30. There it names sheep and goats whose coats carry blotches of a second color, and it stands in short lists beside two other marking words, speckled (נָקֹד) and striped (עָקֹד). Which animals count as marked is precisely what the two men are arguing over, so plain herding vocabulary ends up doing the work of a contract.
The two remaining uses take the word out of the flock and put it on worn goods:
sandals mended with pieces sewn over the holes, worn by the men of Gibeon as part of their pretense of having traveled a long way (Joshua 9:5)
shrines a woman pieces together out of her own clothing, in Ezekiel's picture of Jerusalem's unfaithfulness (Ezekiel 16:16)
What ties all of this together is the look of something made of mismatched pieces. On a goat that is simply how the animal was born. On a sandal or a piece of cloth it is the result of work done to it, and in both of those passages the patched thing is shabby or makeshift.
Nuances
1aspotted: marked with patches of a second color, said of sheep and goats
TranslatabilityDirect
Gen 30:32 (2×)Gen 30:33Gen 30:35 (2×)Gen 30:39
1bmade of pieces of cloth: patchwork, and so of many colors
Ezk 16:16*
1cpatched: mended with pieces sewn over the worn places, said of footwear
the same Hebrew word reaches beyond living creatures to leather and cloth, covering mended sandals and pieced together shrines, which English would never call spottedJos 9:5Ezk 16:16
Both
both describe a surface broken up by patches of a second colorGen 30:32
Only spotted
"spotted" in English often carries a hint of being stained or blemished, a note of disapproval the Hebrew word does not sound
the same word describes living animals whose coats are marked from birth, which no English speaker would call patchedGen 30:33Gen 30:39
Both
both picture a surface made of pieces of one thing set into anotherJos 9:5
Only patched
"patched" in English assumes repair by somebody's hand, while the Hebrew is just as happy describing a marking nobody put there
“colorful”
Comparison data is not available for this English gloss yet.
How tala differs from similar Hebrew words
נָקֹד"speckled": fine scattered dots rather than the larger blotches this word names, and the two stand side by side in the same lists (Genesis 30:32;Genesis 30:35)
This is the only one of the two that leaves the flock. It describes sandals mended with patches on the feet of the men from Gibeon (Joshua 9:5), and the shrines Ezekiel says the woman pieced together out of her own clothing (Ezekiel 16:16). The other word is used of nothing but sheep and goats.Jos 9:5Ezk 16:16
Away from the flock it points to a mark that someone's work put there rather than a coat an animal was born with, so "patched" fits it as well as "spotted": worn sandals held together with pieces sewn on (Joshua 9:5), and cloth cut up and made into something else (Ezekiel 16:16). In both places the patched thing is shabby or makeshift, part of a disguise in the first and part of an accusation in the second.Jos 9:5Ezk 16:16
Both
In every verse where both turn up they work as a pair, together marking off the patterned animals from the plain ones: the wage Jacob asks for (Genesis 30:32), the test he offers of his own honesty (Genesis 30:33), the animals Laban pulls out of the herd and hands to his sons (Genesis 30:35), and the young the flock then bears (Genesis 30:39).Gen 30:32Gen 30:35
Neither one says which colors are involved, only that a second color breaks up the first, and English versions pass "speckled" and "spotted" back and forth between them. Which English word lands on which Hebrew word in Genesis 30:32 or Genesis 30:33 is a choice a translation makes, not a fixed match.Gen 30:32Gen 30:33
Only this word carries the wage bargain past the day the flocks were divided. When Laban keeps rewriting the terms, it is the speckled animals that are named as Jacob's pay and then born to the flock (Genesis 31:8). The other word drops out of the argument entirely.Gen 31:8
It is also the word Jacob uses when he tells his wives what he saw in a dream, where it stands in a short list of coat patterns beside "striped" and "mottled" (Genesis 31:10, repeated in Genesis 31:12). That list is a herder's vocabulary for how a living animal is marked, and the other word never appears in it.Gen 31:10Gen 31:12
עָקֹד"striped, banded": markings that run in bands around the animal, listed alongside this word among the animals Laban pulls out of the flock (Genesis 30:35;Genesis 30:39)
Only this word leaves the flock and describes a repair: the Gibeonites arrive in worn sandals that have been patched, so the same word that names blotches on an animal names pieces set into leather.Jos 9:5
It also describes cloth of mixed pieces: Jerusalem takes her garments and makes patchwork shrines out of them, and the word carries the sense of something put together from scraps of different colors.Ezk 16:16
For animals it names irregular blotches of a second color rather than any set shape, which is why Jacob can point at goats that are simply marked, and why an unmarked animal in his flock would count as stolen.Gen 30:32Gen 30:33
Both
Both name a marking on the coat of a sheep or goat, and both work as a visible label of ownership: the day Laban sorts his flock, the banded animals and the blotched ones are pulled out together.Gen 30:35
They belong to the same short list of coat patterns, and one lambing can produce both, since the flock gives birth to young that are banded, speckled, and blotched.Gen 30:39
It names one clear band running around the animal, a single pattern definite enough to label a whole class of animals by itself: Laban can promise that the banded ones will be the wages, and Jacob can set the flock facing a banded animal.Gen 31:8Gen 30:40
This is the marking that carries the breeding story: the males mating with the flock are banded, both in Jacob's dream and in the message that explains why his flocks grew.Gen 31:10Gen 31:12
בָּרֹד"dappled, mottled": a broken mixture of light and dark over the whole body, appearing only in Jacob's account of his dream (Genesis 31:10;Genesis 31:12)
reaches past living creatures to things people make and mend, covering sandals repaired with pieces sewn over the worn places and shrines pieced together out of a woman's own clothingJos 9:5Ezk 16:16
is the working vocabulary of the wage bargain itself, naming the animals Jacob asks for as his pay and the ones Laban pulls out of the flock that same dayGen 30:32Gen 30:35
Both
both describe an animal whose coat is broken up by a second color, and each stands in a short list of marked animals inside the same argument between Jacob and Laban, set beside the word rendered "speckled"Gen 31:10Gen 30:32
names a marking of its own, listed as a third pattern after the striped and the speckled animals, a broken mix of light and dark running through the whole coat rather than patches set onto itGen 31:10Gen 31:12
is not tied to sheep and goats: Zechariah uses it of the horses pulling the fourth chariot, and then calls that whole team by the marking alone as it heads for the south countryZec 6:3Zec 6:6
in the flock story it belongs to a dream rather than to the pen, describing the animals Jacob says he was shown while asleep rather than animals anyone had counted out by handGen 31:10Gen 31:12
tala in the other biblical languages
ἐπίβλημαGreek“patch”"a patch": the Greek word for the piece of cloth sewn onto a worn garment (Matthew 9:16), naming the patch itself, where the Hebrew word describes the patched thing
Most of its uses have nothing to do with repair at all. It describes markings an animal was born with, blotches of a second color on the sheep and goats Jacob and Laban argue over.Gen 30:32Gen 30:35Gen 30:39
When it does describe repair, it describes the mended object rather than the material added to it. Sandals are "patched", and cloth is pieced together, but the pieces themselves are never named by this word.Jos 9:5Ezk 16:16
Both
Both belong to the ordinary work of mending worn things with scraps of material. The Gibeonites travel in sandals rendered "patched", and the scrap sewn onto a worn coat is the Greek word rendered "patch".Jos 9:5Mat 9:16
Both leave the reader looking at something built out of mismatched pieces, where the added material does not agree with what it was set into, and the result reads as makeshift rather than whole.Ezk 16:16Luk 5:36
Names the piece of cloth itself, the scrap that gets sewn on, so it can stand as the thing acted on or the thing that pulls away. The Hebrew word never names a piece; it only describes how a surface looks once pieces are in it.Mat 9:16Mrk 2:21
Every use sits inside one saying of Jesus, where the repair is the whole point of the picture: unshrunk cloth sewn onto a worn garment pulls away and leaves a worse tear.Mrk 2:21Luk 5:36
What scholars say about tala
טלא is attested in the Hebrew Bible only in participial forms: the qal passive participle טָלוּא and its plurals in Gen 30:32, 33, 35, 39 and Ezek 16:16, and the pual participle מְטֻלָּאוֹת in Josh 9:5, eight tokens over six verses. BDB heads the entry "patch, spot" and treats the two applications as one root, glossing the Genesis occurrences as spotted (of small cattle) and Josh 9:5 as patched; HALOT and DCH agree on the shared idea of a surface covered with patches, HALOT rendering the Genesis participle "mottled, spotted" and the Joshua form "patched." In Josh 9:5 the participle is paired with בָּלוֹת "worn out" of both sandals and clothing, so the sense of repair is fixed by the context rather than by the stem alone. Ezek 16:16 בָּמוֹת טְלֻאוֹת is the disputed case: the noun phrase describes cultic platforms made from the woman's own בְּגָדִים, and interpreters divide between a patchwork construction pieced from those garments and a variegated or motley appearance, the latter reflected in the commentaries and in most English versions with "colorful" or "of various colors." The lexica file this root separately from טָלֶה / טְלִי "lamb," whose consonants coincide but which is normally traced to the Aramaic term for a young one, so the resemblance carries no semantic weight.