Shalom everyone,
I’ve only recently become aware that quite a few English-speakers seem to think that David had red hair (I was completely oblivious to this view before)! I’ve also learned that some of them are irritated that the actor playing the young David in the new Amazon series, ‘House of David’, is portrayed by a brown-skinned actor, instead of a white guy with red hair(!)
Before I look at the Hebrew word for ‘ruddy’, admoni, let’s be sensible and logical about this: look at who David was and what he did. He was a Judahite shepherd-boy who spent most of his time outdoors. Even in European countries, up until the early 20th century, so-called ‘white’ people who worked outdoors, such as farmworkers, had a tanned complexion. All over Europe in the olden days, a tanned complexion was linked so much with the working class, that a pale skin became a sign of the rich upper class.
So, someone who was a Semite from the Middle East, who worked outdoors, logically is likely to have had a tanned complexion. Surely a shepherd with pale skin and red hair would have suffered sunburn! Red hair is extremely rare in the Middle East, unless you have some European ancestry.
Now to the Hebrew word admoni. This word, in most English translations of the Hebrew Bible, is rendered as ‘ruddy’. I myself have used this word to describe Esau in my HEBT translation. However, I didn’t mean ‘someone with red hair’.
When the Hebrew admoni (‘ruddy’) is used of someone’s complexion / skin-tone, it is metaphorically comparing the skin to the reddish-brown colour of copper. If someone was described as admoni, it implied a healthy, glowing, TANNED skin, not the colour of their hair. It implied someone who spent time outdoors, and so was healthy and full of vitality.
In biblical Hebrew, admoni automatically implies a healthy, tanned skin, alluding to a person who is naturally fit, having spent a lot of time outdoors. This was David: “He was tanned, had beautiful eyes, and was attractive.” (1Sam 16:12).
So what about Esau? When he was born, he is described in Gen 25:25 as being born naturally tanned (in Hebrew, literally, ‘ruddy’), not red-haired. In the next few verses, it goes on to paint him as the outdoors type, while Jacob is portrayed as the indoors type (Gen 25:27). Esau was the healthy, vigorous, bronzed, outdoors son loved by his father, while Jacob was the paler-skinned lad who stayed with his mother indoors and around camp.
So the actor playing David in the Amazon series is exactly the right actor to portray the tanned, outdoors-type boy that David was – exactly as the Hebrew Bible implies.
blessings
Shmuliq