in particular their treatment of the sky: ‘These hymns, of more than ten thousand lines, are brimming with descriptions of the heavens. Scarcely any subject is evoked more frequently. The sun and reddening dawn’s play of color, day and night, cloud and lightning, the air and the ether, all these are unfolded before us over, and over again, in splendor and vivid fullness. But there is only one thing that no one would ever learn from those ancient songs who did not already know it, and that is that the sky is blue.’ So it was not just Homer who seemed to be blue-blind, but the ancient Indian poets too. And so, it would appear, was Moses, or at least whoever wrote the Old Testament. It is no secret, says Geiger, that the heavens play a considerable role in the Bible, appearing as they do in the very first verse… and in hundreds of places after that. And yet, like Homeric Greek, biblical Hebrew does not have a word for ‘blue.’
~ Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass