Reply To: Techeiles 🔵❎🐌☑️🐟

Zvei Dinim – A direct quote from Mendel E. Singer Ph.D. regarding the lashon of chilazon: “Petil followers offer some linguistic arguments in attempting to support their position. The word

chilazon is a general term for snail, not only in modern Hebrew but in some other languages as well. Aside from not

pointing specifically to murex trunculus, it is not clear which species chilazon referred to at the time of the Gemara.

It may have been a general term for mollusk. Did it only include gastropods, or could it have included cephalopods

purple or murex). Rabbi Herzog raises this issue and dismisses it rather handily.67 He points out that everywhere

else (including that same chapter) the Septuagint uses iakinthos for techeilet and porphyra for argaman, and shows

how the Hebrew text they must have been given could not have matched our Masoretic tradition, and that the

translation was probably given for argaman, not techeilet. Some have suggested that Raavya (Berachot 9b Siman 25) equates techeilet with porphyrin, the Greek

word for murex, though they do not supply a full explanation of this statement by Raavya and do not mention that in

both Greek and Latin the word for murex and the word for purple are the same. Let us examine the passage in

question. Raavya quotes a Yerushalmi (a part that is no longer extant) explaining the time for reciting the morning

[from the time when one can distinguish] between techeilet and karti, between porphyrin and parufinen,

comparison bein porphyrin bein parufinen is a color distinction that would be as hard to tell apart in the dark as blue

consistent with the hagahot where this color is equated with argaman. Thus, bein porphyrin bein parufinen might

mean to distinguish between the purple border of a robe and the rest of the garment. Petil suggests that this Yerushalmi is equating murex with techeilet. Obviously they cannot mean that

techeilet is the murex, but rather the source of techeilet is the murex. However, this logic would render the

it is difficult to see how a purple coat could be the source of karti. Karti is usually understood to be green, like a leek.69 There is a minority view that karti is not green, but a different color close to techeilet.70 However, even if

you rely on this view, which is based on a citation from Aruch which is no longer extant, to explain a Yerushalmi

as equating murex with techeilet.”