StrongerBible

pas

פַּס

HebrewH6446“many colors, with sleeves, ...”

Appears 5 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Gen 37:3Gen 37:23Gen 37:322Sa 13:182Sa 13:19
Root family
Names & words formed with this
Word studyResearch-gradePAHSnoun

What pas means

most likely "palms and soles": the word that makes a tunic a long one reaching to the wrists and ankles, marking its wearer as royal or too privileged to work

TranslatabilityUntranslatableCertaintyContested

This word never appears on its own. All five times, it sits inside a single phrase, attached to the ordinary word for a tunic (כֻּתֹּנֶת): three times for the garment Jacob gives Joseph in Genesis 37, twice for the one Tamar wears and then tears in 2 Samuel 13. Since it is never used of anything else, everything we know about it has to be pieced together from outside those five verses.

Read as "palms and soles," the phrase describes a tunic long enough to reach them: sleeves down to the wrists, a hem down to the ankles. An ordinary tunic had no sleeves and stopped at the knees, so this was clothing nobody could work in. Three lines of evidence point that way:

  • Aramaic uses this same word for the flat of the hand (פַּס) in Daniel 5.
  • Ancient Greek and Latin translators of 2 Samuel rendered the phrase "reaching to the wrist" or "ankle length."
  • One battlefield is named both Ephes-dammim and Pas-dammim, pairing this word with the everyday word for an end or edge (אֶפֶס).

The 2 Samuel passage does something unusual: it pauses to explain the garment, noting that this is how the unmarried daughters of the king dressed, in robes (מְעִיל). Writers only explain a phrase their readers might not know, which suggests the wording was already old or unclear by the time 2 Samuel was written down.

That explanation is also what keeps the story from depending on the puzzle. Scholars disagree sharply about the cut and the cloth, but not about the effect: the garment announced who its wearer was. Joseph's said his father had singled him out above his brothers. Tamar's said she was a king's daughter. Both stories turn on that announcement being violently undone, the coat stripped off and smeared with blood, the tunic torn by the woman wearing it.

Gen 37:3Gen 37:23Gen 37:322Sa 13:182Sa 13:19

What scholars say about pas

BDB (828) glosses פַּס "flat of hand or foot (palm, sole)" and כְּתֹנֶת פַּסִּים "a tunic reaching to palms and soles," filing the noun under a root I. פסס compared with פשׂה "to spread"; Gesenius (Tregelles) derives it from פָּסַס as "extremity" and glosses the phrase "a tunic extending to the wrists and ankles, a long tunic with sleeves," invoking Josephus (Ant. VII.8.1) on the long-sleeved ankle-length tunics of royal virgins. HALOT lists three options (Speiser's ornamented tunic, with a question mark; a garment reaching wrists and ankles, with König, Zorell, Dalman and Müller; Albright's overlapping tablet-like layers, BA 36 [1973] 31f., citing Punic פס "tablet") but defaults to "long garment reaching to the extremities"; DCH registers three possible homonyms without adjudicating. The controlling comparative datum is Biblical Aramaic פַּס יְדָה "palm of the hand" at Daniel 5:5, 24 (so Collins, Hermeneia 1993; Goldingay, WBC; Hartman and Di Lella, AB 23, 1978), reinforced by Syriac passtā "palm, sole," Aramaic passā "tablet, flat surface" (Sokoloff, DJBA 901, DJPA 431), Phoenician פס "tablet" (DNWSI II.921) and rabbinic פִּסַּת הַיָּד / פִּסַּת הָרֶגֶל (Jastrow 1191; m. Ohalot 1:8); the shared semantic core is "flat spread-out surface," which suits palm, sole and tablet but not "many-colored." Tur-Sinai, in Ben-Yehuda, argues that the later Hebrew "stripe" sense is a loan rather than authentic Semitic, weakening the etymological base of the many-colored reading. Speiser (Genesis, AB 1, 1964, 289-290) dismissed both traditional renderings as "sheer guesses from the context" and proposed Akkadian pišannu, a term for appliqué ornaments known from the Eanna temple inventories published by Oppenheim (JNES 8 [1949] 172-193); Tawil (Akkadian Lexical Companion, 2009, 300) endorses the equation, but Oppenheim himself wrote that the meaning of the pišannu garment is not clear, and McCarter (II Samuel, AB 9, 1984, 318-319, 322-323) repudiated Speiser in the same series, observing that the Mesopotamian garment clothed a divine statue rather than a person and that passīm is plural, not dual, hence "gown extending to the extremities." That reading runs unbroken from Driver (Genesis, 1904, 322 n.3), Gunkel (1901) and Skinner (ICC, 1910, 444) through von Rad (OTL, 1972, 351), who located the many-colored rendering as a Septuagint interpretation preserved in the KJV. Dewrell (Biblica 97 [2016] 161-174) rejects Speiser and also Mendenhall's Ugaritic pḏ (refuted phonologically by Smith, Ugaritic Baal Cycle 1, 1994, 293-294), derives the noun from a root cognate to Akkadian pasāmu / paṣānu "to veil" (CAD P 217-218), compares Middle Assyrian Laws A 40-41 on veiling as the legal marker of respectable feminine status, and argues that the phrase is philologically original to 2 Samuel 13 and was secondarily inserted into Genesis 37, noting that bare כְּתֹנֶת stands at Gen 37:31, 33 while the full phrase clusters at 37:3, 23, 32. Bledstein (in Brenner, ed., Samuel and Kings: A Feminist Companion, 2000, 65-83) reads a flounced kaunakes-style priestess robe; Görg (BN 102 [2000] 9-13) proposed Egyptian pśy "dye," which Dewrell shows rests on silently deleted question marks in the Wörterbuch; Ugaritic lbš psm rq (CAT3 4.205:5) is glossed "veil, gauze(?)" by DULAT 685. Wenham (WBC 2, 1994, 351), Hamilton (NICOT, 1995, 407-409), Waltke, Sarna (JPS Genesis, 1989, 255), Westermann (CC, 1986) and Alter decline to adjudicate the philology while agreeing that the garment is a status marker, with the internal gloss at 2 Samuel 13:18 on the dress of the king's virgin daughters as the interpretive control and, as Sarna notes, as evidence that the phrase was already obscure to a biblical author; Noonan (in The Body: Lived, Cultured, Adorned, HUC Press, 2022, 319-360) is now the fullest dedicated treatment. The version split governs reception: Septuagint Genesis χιτῶνα ποικίλον against Septuagint Samuel χιτὼν καρπωτός (Lucianic ἀστραγαλωτός), with Aquila ἀστραγαλωτός and Symmachus χειριδωτός following the extremity route, and Vulgate tunicam polymitam at Gen 37:3 beside tunica talaris at 2 Samuel 13:18-19 and the hybrid tunica talari et polymita at Gen 37:23; the KJV "coat of many colours" descends through Wycliffe (1382) and Tyndale (1526) from the Genesis line alone.

Where scholars disagree about pas

What פַּס itself means, and therefore what kind of garment כְּתֹנֶת פַּסִּים names. The noun occurs only in this phrase (Gen 37:3, 23, 32; 2 Sam 13:18, 19), so every reading is reconstructed from comparative evidence, and at least four etymologies remain in print.

  • majorityThe noun means the flat of the hand or foot (palm, sole), so the plural denotes the extremities a garment reaches: a long tunic with sleeves to the wrists and a hem to the ankles, marking an elite, non-laboring wearer. The decisive evidence is Biblical Aramaic פַּס יְדָה "palm of the hand" (Dan 5:5, 24), with Syriac, Phoenician and rabbinic support and the place-name equivalence Ephes-dammim (1 Sam 17:1) = Pas-dammim (1 Chr 11:13).; BDB, p. 828, s.v. פַּס; HALOT, s.v. פַּס (default gloss); W. Gesenius, Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon (Tregelles ET), s.v. פַּס; P. K. McCarter Jr., II Samuel (Anchor Bible 9), 1984, pp. 318-319, 322-323; J. Skinner, Genesis (ICC), 1910, p. 444; G. von Rad, Genesis (OTL), rev. ed. 1972, p. 351
  • minorityThe word is an adaptation of Akkadian pišannu, a technical term for appliqué ornaments on costly vests and bodices, so the phrase names an ornamented tunic on the model of the ceremonial robes dressed on Mesopotamian divine statues; the traditional "many colours" and "with sleeves" renderings are guesses from context.; E. A. Speiser, Genesis (Anchor Bible 1), 1964, pp. 289-290; H. Tawil, An Akkadian Lexical Companion for Biblical Hebrew, 2009, p. 300
  • minorityThe word belongs with a Semitic root meaning to be broad or spread flat and, in its later Hebrew sense, denotes a strip or stripe, so the phrase names a tunic of variegated strips: the reading behind Septuagint Genesis χιτῶνα ποικίλον and the KJV "coat of many colours."; E. Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language, s.v. פַּס; V. P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 18-50 (NICOT), 1995, pp. 407-409
  • minorityThe noun derives from a root cognate to Akkadian pasāmu / paṣānu "to veil, wrap the head," so the phrase names a veiling garment marking respectable feminine status on the model of Middle Assyrian Laws A 40-41; the phrase is original to the Tamar narrative and was secondarily imported into Genesis 37.; H. D. Dewrell, "How Tamar's Veil Became Joseph's Coat," Biblica 97 (2016), pp. 161-174
In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), p. 828, s.v. פַּסlexicon
  • HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner-Stamm), s.v. פַּסlexicon
  • W. Gesenius, Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon (Tregelles ET), s.v. פַּסlexicon
  • DCH (D. J. A. Clines, ed.), Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, s.v. פַּסlexicon
  • H. Tawil, An Akkadian Lexical Companion for Biblical Hebrew, Ktav, 2009, p. 300lexicon
  • M. Jastrow, A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature, p. 1191lexicon
  • E. A. Speiser, Genesis (Anchor Bible 1), 1964, pp. 289-290commentary
  • P. K. McCarter Jr., II Samuel (Anchor Bible 9), 1984, pp. 318-319, 322-323commentary
  • G. von Rad, Genesis (OTL), rev. ed. 1972, p. 351commentary
  • J. Skinner, Genesis (ICC), 1910, p. 444commentary
  • S. R. Driver, The Book of Genesis, 1904, p. 322 n.3commentary
  • G. J. Wenham, Genesis 16-50 (WBC 2), 1994, p. 351commentary
  • V. P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 18-50 (NICOT), 1995, pp. 407-409commentary
  • N. M. Sarna, Genesis (JPS Torah Commentary), 1989, p. 255commentary
  • C. Westermann, Genesis 37-50 (Continental Commentary), 1986commentary
  • J. J. Collins, Daniel (Hermeneia), 1993, ad Dan 5:5, 24commentary
  • H. D. Dewrell, "How Tamar's Veil Became Joseph's Coat," Biblica 97 (2016), pp. 161-174article
  • A. L. Oppenheim, "The Golden Garments of the Gods," JNES 8 (1949), pp. 172-193article
  • A. J. Bledstein, "Tamar and the Coat of Many Colors," in A. Brenner, ed., Samuel and Kings: A Feminist Companion to the Bible, 2000, pp. 65-83article
  • M. Görg, "Der gefärbte Rock Josefs," Biblische Notizen 102 (2000), pp. 9-13article
  • B. J. Noonan, "An Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat," in The Body: Lived, Cultured, Adorned, HUC Press, 2022, pp. 319-360article
  • M. S. Smith, The Ugaritic Baal Cycle, vol. 1, Brill, 1994, pp. 293-294monograph
  • M. T. Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor (SBLWAW 6), Middle Assyrian Laws A 40-41reference

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of פַּס

m p absolute

פַּסִּים

Gen 37:3, Gen 37:23, Gen 37:32, 2Sa 13:18, 2Sa 13:19