Commentaries:
Adam Clarke
Though your sins be as scarlet - shani , "scarlet or crimson," dibaphum, twice dipped, or double dyed; from shanah , iterare , to double, or to do a thing twice. This derivation seems much more probable than that which Salmasius prefers from shanan , acuere , to whet, from the sharpness and strength of the color, ; tela , the same; properly the worm, vermiculus , (from whence vermeil), for this color was produced from a worm or insect which grew in a coccus or excrescence of a shrub of the ilex kind, (see Plin. Nat. Hist. 16:8), like the cochineal worm in the opuntia of America. See Ulloa' s Voyage book v., chap. ii., note to page 342. There is a shrub of this kind that grows in Provence and Languedoc, and produces the like insect, called the kermes oak, (see Miller, Dict. Quercus), from kermez , the Arabic word for this color, whence our word crimson is derived.
" Neque amissos colores
Lana refert medicata fuco ,"
says the poet, applying the same image to a different purpose. To discharge these strong colors is impossible to human art or power; but to the grace and power of God all things, even much more difficult are possible and easy. Some copies have keshanim , "like crimson garments."
Though they be red, etc. - But the conjunction vau is added by twenty-one of Kennicott' s, and by forty-two of De Rossi' s MSS., by some early editions, with the Septuagint, Syriac, Vulgate, and Arabic. It makes a fuller and more emphatic sense. "And though they be red as crimson," etc.
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