@ileolai:# WHY DOES AZIRAPHALE LOOK LIKE HES BEEN FED THRU A WOODCHIPPER THO # LIKE HIS CLOTHES ARE JUST SHREDDED # IN CLOSER SHOTS YOU CAN SEE WHAT LOOKS LIKE HASTILY SEWN ON PATCHES # MEANWHILE CROWLEY IS READY TO POSE FOR AN EDITORIAL
Due to a wildly misspent youth, I can actually answer this one! The answer is that they’re actually BOTH dressed for a Vogue editorial - the difference is that Crowley’s actually up-to-date and is wearing expensive clothing for the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean, while Aziraphale’s wearing expensive clothing for the nomadic Ancient Near East.
Aziraphale’s overcoat looks so ragged and patched because it’s lots of tanned skins sewn together - you can see it better HERE. He’s wearing the same linen clothing with golden beads at the neck that he wore in Mesopotamia three thousand years ago, but he’s added the skin coat and a turban. More skins = more animals. More linen = more work. Along with the gold, a very long tunic, a long coat (WITH SLEEVES), and a turban of a lot of material all indicate that Aziraphale is dressed very expensively, but very expensively for a Canaanite nomad in 3000 BCE.
However, by 33 CE, the major indicator of wealth wasn’t the amount of material being used in clothing: it was the dye the material was coloured with. We think of black being a minimalist, ascetic colour, but right through to the Middle Ages, black was one of the most expensive clothing colours because of the sheer amount of dyes used to achieve it. Crowley’s veil and sash in particular are a deep black - that’s a large amount of dye that’s being used! (Crowley’s veil is also very sheer, meaning it’s either very fine linen or even silk, which was around in the West at this point but was desperately expensive)
The difference between Crowley and Aziraphale in this scene is actually demonstrated by my very favourite Biblical mistranslation. Genesis 37:3 reads, “Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age: and he made him a ketonet passim.” This phrase is only used twice in the Tanakh, here, and to describe Tamar’s clothing in 2 Samuel 13:18-19. More importantly, this is the only use in the Torah.
From context, we know that this item of clothing was special. In the English-speaking word, this is the “coat of many colours”, the “amazing technicolour dream coat”. But passim is more likely to mean “to the extremities” (i.e. hands or ankles), thus meaning a long coat, or a coat with sleeves. JUST LIKE WHAT AZIRAPHALE IS WEARING.
When the Torah was being translated into Greek in Alexandria in about 250 BCE (the Nevi'im and the Ketuvim are translated later, often using whatever precedents for rare words were set by the translators of the Torah), the translator comes across this rare adjective, and thinks, “Fucked if I know what that means.” And they know from context that this coat is special and expensive, and they live in a world in which colour and dye are the main things that makes clothing special and expensive, so they write in poikilos (multi-coloured), and move on to the next sentence.
tl;dr: Both Crowley and Aziraphale are well-dressed in the Crucifixion scene, Aziraphale’s just out of fashion by two or three millennia.
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