Was Joseph’s coat really a coat of many colors?

What Genesis says

Jacob has twelve sons by four women, and he does not hide which one he loves most.

Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age, and he made him a tunic of many colors. His brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, and they hated him, and couldn’t speak peaceably to him.

Notice what the text does not say. It never describes the colors, the cloth or the cut. It only says that the gift was a sign, and that the brothers read it at once.

The word nobody can pin down

The Hebrew is ketonet passim. Ketonet is the ordinary word for a tunic, the long shirt everyone wore; God makes the same garments of skin for Adam and Eve (Genesis 3:21). The trouble is passim, a word found only in this story and one other.

• Many colors. The Septuagint, the Greek translation made before the time of Jesus, rendered it a varied, many-colored tunic. The King James Version followed that line in 1611 with “a coat of many colours,” and English never let it go.
• Long sleeves. In Hebrew and Aramaic, pas can mean the palm of the hand or the sole of the foot. The writing hand in Daniel 5:5 is literally “the pas of the hand.” So passim may mean a tunic reaching to the wrists and ankles: a long robe with sleeves.
• Rabbinic readings. Rashi, in the 11th century, took it as a robe of fine wool. He also passed on a midrash that reads the letters of passim as the four stages of Joseph’s fall: Potiphar, merchants, Ishmaelites and Midianites.

A robe for a princess

The phrase appears in one other story, and it settles what the robe meant, if not what it looked like.

She had a garment of various colors on her, for the king’s daughters who were virgins dressed in such robes.

Tamar, King David’s daughter, wears a ketonet passim. Even the World English Bible translates the same Hebrew two different ways in the two stories. Either way it was royal dress, not workwear. A long-sleeved, ankle-length robe is useless for herding sheep. On Joseph it said: this son does not work in the fields, and he outranks his brothers.

Could it have been colorful too? Very possibly. A tomb painting at Beni Hasan in Egypt, from about 1890 BC, shows a band of Asiatic travelers from the Levant arriving in Egypt in garments woven in bright patterns of stripes and zigzags.

The coat that tells the story

Whatever it looked like, the robe drives the plot. The brothers strip it off before they throw Joseph into the pit (Genesis 37:23). They kill a goat, dip the robe in its blood and bring it home: “Examine it, now, and see if it is your son’s tunic or not” (37:32). Jacob, who once fooled his own father with the skins of young goats (Genesis 27:16), is fooled with a goat’s blood. Clothes keep marking Joseph’s fortunes: a garment left in the hand of Potiphar’s wife (39:12), then robes of fine linen from Pharaoh (41:42).

The colors won in the end. Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat for a London school in 1968, and Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors” (1971) turned it into a song about a coat her mother sewed from rags. Joseph’s brothers, and his large family, are in Who were the 12 sons of Jacob?