Bleaching Wool (Bechoros 29)

Today's Daf contains a reference to bleached wool, and you might be wondering, you know, where did they get bleach to make the wool? How do they do that anyways? I mean, they can't just go to the corner store and get some Clorox or something like that.

So I did a little quick research, and I found out that the way that the ancients used to make bleach is, uh, through ashes, uh, particularly from hardwood.

So the very, very oldest way to bleach was known already in prehistoric times, uh, using the sun by just leaving things out and, and especially if you spend time in Israel, you know how powerful the sun is there and how, you know, colors just fade right away.

But if you've got regular wool and you want to bleach it in a more consistent fashion, what you have to do is take some, uh, ashes from hardwood, and then you, uh, add some water, and you leave it for a while, especially rainwater if it's soft water.

You leave it for a while, and then the ashes will produce a kind of a thin filmy liquid on the top as the ashes settle and mix a little bit with the water and the, the filmy stuff rises to the top.

That is called lye, L-Y-E, and that's a, a very alkaline substance.

It's very caustic.

You have to be very careful how you handle it.

You can mix it with some fatty substances if you want to make it into a soap, and there's some really fascinating uses for laundry in general.

But that particular solution of, made of wood ashes and rainwater can actually be used to bleach wool, and if you leave the wool in there too long, it will completely disintegrate the fibers.

But basi- basically, that's how it will be done in the ancient world.