What did people in the Bible look like?
"Charm can fool you. Beauty fades" (Proverbs 31:30).
"Braiding your hair doesn’t make you beautiful. Wearing gold jewelry or fine clothes doesn’t make you beautiful. Instead, your beauty comes from inside you" (1 Peter 3:3–4a).
We don’t know for sure what they all looked like, but the Bible does talk about how some people looked. People come in many different shapes and sizes: short, tall, fair skin, dark skin, dark hair, blonde hair. Some have blue eyes, some have brown or even hazel eyes.
We don't know a whole lot about what people looked like in the Bible. The Bible does give us some descriptions of certain people, though. We do know that Esau was hairy and red (Genesis 25:25). We know that Queen Esther was beautiful (Esther 2:7) and Leah was plain-looking compared to her sister Rachel (Genesis 29:17). In Isaiah 53:2 the Bible tells us that Jesus Himself was not necessarily handsome. There was nothing special about His looks.
One other thing to remember is that many of the main characters in the Bible were Middle Eastern, so they would have had darker skin and hair. They probably didn’t look like the pictures artists have created with their own ideas of how these people looked.
In 1 Samuel chapter 16 God told the prophet Samuel to go and anoint one of Jesse's sons to be the next king of Israel. Jesse had all of his sons come and stand in from of Samuel. But God told Samuel none of them was the right person. They almost forgot about David because he was out taking care of the sheep. God told Samuel in verse 7 "...Man looks at how someone appears on the outside. But I look at what is in the heart." God doesn't care what we look like on the outside. He cares more about our heart attitude.
