laven

Whiteness in the Hebrew Bible is the look of something with nothing on it: fresh snow, washed wool, wood stripped of its bark. This verb names the change into that state. It works in both directions, so a thing can turn white on its own, or someone can make it white.

Only one verse uses it for plain color. Joel describes a fig tree so thoroughly stripped by locusts that the naked branches shine pale. Everywhere else the whiteness stands for a person or a people made clean: scarlet sin turning snow white in Isaiah, a psalmist asking to come out of God's washing whiter than snow, and in Daniel the faithful who pass through persecution and come out bright.

Two things are worth noticing about the picture. Whiteness here is not innocence in the abstract; it is a result, what a stain looks like once it is gone. And it keeps company with the vocabulary of laundry and metalworking: washing, sifting, refining. The plain Hebrew word for "white" (לָבָן) names the shade, and this verb names the change.

This is a separate word that happens to share the spelling. It comes from the Hebrew noun for a sun-dried mud brick (לְבֵנָה), the way English turns the noun "shovel" into the verb "to shovel". It covers the whole job: mixing clay with chopped straw, pressing it into molds, and leaving it to harden.

It shows up in only two scenes, and both are about building on human terms. At Babel the plan opens with "let us make bricks", and the writer pauses to note that brick served them where others would use stone. In Egypt the same work is the quota beaten out of Israelite slaves, and the story turns on straw being withheld while the daily count stays the same. In both places the brick is the manufactured thing, shaped by people rather than lifted out of the ground.

Most scholars think the brick word itself goes back to the pale color of drying clay, which is why the two verbs look alike. That is a claim about origins, not about meaning: nothing in these three verses has anything to do with turning white.