Answers about…
paint and painting

The people of the ancient Near East loved bright color, but Scripture does not mention it very much.

Archaeology and neighboring cultures fill in a much richer picture.

Hebrew words translated as “paint”

• Pukh — black mineral powder (stibnite/antimony or galena, aka lead glance) used as eye makeup
• Mashach — “to smear/anoint,” used of coating a house interior
• Kachal — “to smear,” used of painting the eyes in Ezekiel 23:40.

Wall paint

Israelites who lived in or traded with Egypt knew a painting tradition far richer than anything preserved in Judah. Egyptian craftsmen used red and yellow ochre, carbon black, calcite white, malachite green, and Egyptian blue on tomb walls, coffins, papyri, and statues for more than 2-thousand years. The famous Beni Hasan tomb paintings of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom even depict Semitic visitors in multicolored garments.

King Jehoiakim is criticized for his cedar-paneled palace “painted with vermilion” (shashar) while ignoring justice (Jeremiah 22:14).

The same bright red pigment appears again in Ezekiel 23:14: The imaginary harlot Oholibah (representing the Kingdom of Judah) sees “images of the Chaldeans portrayed in vermilion” on a wall and lusts after them.

Shashar was probably cinnabar (mercury sulfide) or red lead oxide—expensive, vivid, and associated with luxury and foreign display.

Assyrian palace reliefs retain traces of vermilion on details.

King Herod’s palaces (Jericho and elsewhere) employed imported or locally made Egyptian blue and expensive cinnabar.

Hellenistic houses at Tell Iẓṭabba (Tell Itzabba) in northern Israel used red and yellow ochre and carbon black in frescos.

1st century synagogue walls at Magdala also used Egyptian blue alongside local iron oxides.

Painted tombs appear in larger numbers from the Roman period onward, used by Jews, pagans, and Christians.

Paint on scultures

Many, if not most, of the ancient white sculptures we view in museums were originally painted with bright colors to make them appear more like real people with real clothing. The colors simply faded away over the millenia, but occasionally remnants are survived.

Idols and Pagan Temples

Many idolatrous wooden and stone images were painted.

Egyptian temples, columns, and tombs were fully painted in many colors—looking far different than the bare stone we see today.

Painted figurines

Hundreds of Judean pillar figurines (8th–early 6th century BC) were coated with white slip, then painted with red and yellow bands at the neck, arms, and breasts. Most of the color has worn off, but enough survives to show they were once brightly decorated.

Many other terracotta figurines and cult objects across the southern Levant were likewise painted.

Pottery

Painted decorations on pottery is common throughout the biblical period—geometric patterns, plants, and occasionally figures—using iron-based slips that fired red, brown, or black.

Eye and face paint / cosmetics

Eye paint is the well-attested among ancient Israelites and their neighbors. Cosmetic palettes, small juglets, and kohl sticks (a small, purpose-made applicator) appear in excavations from the Iron Age onward.

Green malachite or turquoise was sometimes used on the lower eye lids; black on eyebrows and lashes. Red ochre served as cheek rouge.

Kohl sticks and tubes are found across Egypt, Israel and all the Levant, Syria, and Anatolia. They sometimes belonged to men as well as women; in Egypt the lined eye also reduced glare, discouraged flies, and had religious and medical associations.

The custom was widespread in Egypt and Assyria; the Bible’s few references treat it as foreign or morally suspect.

Evil Queen Jezebel “painted her face” (2 Kings 9:30), and the practice of painting the face and the eyes seems to have been common (Jeremiah 4:30; Ezek. 23:40).

Jezebel “put pukh into her eyes” before confronting Jehu (2 Kings 9:30).

Jeremiah and Ezekiel use the same image for Jerusalem as a painted harlot (Jeremiah 4:30; Ezekiel 23:40). Biblical writers treat it as meretricious, not as ordinary respectable grooming.

An allusion to face paint is found in the name of Job's daughter (Job 42:14) Kerenhappuch, meaning “horn of eye-paint” or “horn of cosmetics.” The practice enlarged and darkened the eyes with a fine line drawn between the lids.

Painted shields?

Nahum 2:3 mentions red shields of attacking troops; they may have been painted, copper-covered, or simply described as blood-colored.

Pigments available in biblical times

Color binders in paint

Binders included water, plant gums, egg, and lime (true fresco on wet plaster).

Egyptian tomb painters worked fresco secco (on dry plaster) with a remarkably stable palette that lasted millennia.

With the perishable nature of plaster and organic binders, far fewer painted surfaces in Israel and Judah survived than in Egypt or later Roman Palestine. What survives—cosmetics, a few palace walls, painted figurines, and pottery—shows that color was a part of daily and religious life.

Have any ancient artistic paintings been found in Jerusalem?

Yes. Jerusalem has yielded ancient paintings. The richest finds are from wealthy 2nd Temple houses and from later tombs—not from the First Temple city.

In the late 2nd Temple period artistic paintings looked like fashionable Greco-Roman interior decoration—panels, faux marble, plants—adapted to Jewish tastes in private houses.

Jason’s Tomb (Rehavia, mid-1st century BC) is the earliest clearly pictorial example in the city. The porch walls carry charcoal drawings, including warships and a figure shooting an arrow—simple sketches rather than finished fresco, but unmistakably figurative. Inscriptions identify the tomb as Jewish.

Later painted tombs around Jerusalem include:

• The Birds’ Cave on the Mount of Olives: vines growing from the corners, birds (peacock, doves, partridge, and others) pecking grapes, scattered flowers
• Painted Jewish tombs in the Kidron / Akeldama area and another west of the “Valley of the Kings”
• Byzantine Christian burial caves on the Mount of Olives and near Gethsemane, with red crosses, wreaths, doves, and schematic flowers

These belong to a wider group of more than 30 painted tombs known from Roman–early Byzantine Israel (Jewish, pagan, and Christian).

The best-preserved paintings come from elite residences in the Upper City (today’s Jewish Quarter), destroyed in 70 AD and now displayed in the Wohl Archaeological Museum (Herodian Quarter).

The Palatial Mansion and neighboring houses had frescoed walls in Hellenistic–Roman “Pompeian” styles: colored panels that imitate marble, architectural moldings, and floral motifs. Some rooms show two phases—an earlier painted layer later covered by molded white stucco in a conservative “masonry style.” Surviving decoration in these Jewish houses is almost entirely aniconic: no human or animal figures, unlike some Herodian palaces outside Jerusalem (Jericho, Herodium). Fire from the Roman destruction left scorch marks on the painted plaster.

Fresco fragments of the same period—red and yellow panels, black bands, floral details—have also been recovered from a Roman dump beside the Eastern Cardo. Workmanship is high, though not quite at the level of Herod’s own palaces.

Lime plaster was used on floors and installations, and Judah as a whole produced painted pottery and painted pillar figurines, but Jerusalem itself has not produced murals comparable to the 9th–8th century drawings at Kuntillet Ajrud. If palaces or the Temple were painted (as Jeremiah 22:14 implies for a royal house “painted with vermilion”), those surfaces have not survived in identifiable pictorial form.

More information

• Colors in the Bible
• Answers about uses of clay in the Bible, including in cosmetics
• Answers about dye and dyeing in the Bible?
• Archaeology and the Bible, abundant evidence for the Bible’s reliability . Discover answers to your questions.