scarlet: the costly bright-red dye made from a scale insect, and the wool, thread, or cloth colored with it
This word names one of the ancient world's most prized colors, but it points first to a material, not a shade. The dye was harvested by hand from tiny scale insects that cling to a kind of oak, and it took tens of thousands of them to color a single pound of wool. That scarcity made the finished thread expensive, and its color held fast in a way ordinary dyes did not. So when the Bible uses this word it usually points to something concrete and valuable: a length of dyed wool, a woven cloth, a cord, a thread.
Because the material was so recognizable, the word also came to stand for the color itself, a fiery reddish-orange that English Bibles render "scarlet" or sometimes "crimson." The two uses shade into each other, since a thread of this dye and the redness of that thread are hard to pull apart.
The same costly thread does different work in different settings, though the word means the same thing throughout. It is:
- woven with blue and purple into the sacred tent and the priests' clothing
- thrown into the fire in rituals of cleansing
- tied to a wrist or hung in a window as a marker
- worn as a sign of wealth
Isaiah gathers several of these associations at once when he pictures sins "red as scarlet" being washed white, playing on both the color of blood and the reputation of this dye as a stain no washing could remove.