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Work and trades
Potter
Hebrew yotser · Greek kerameus · clay shaped on a wheel and fired
Pottery was the everyday ware of the ancient world: big jars for water, wine, oil and grain, jugs, bowls, oil lamps and round-bottomed cooking pots. The first pots were shaped by hand, often from coils of clay, and may have been made mostly by women at home. The potter’s wheel turned the craft into a trade; the earliest found in Bible lands comes from Ur, about 3500–3000 BC. An early wheel was two stones, the upper one turning on the lower, often spun by an apprentice; the foot-driven wheel came only after about 300 BC. Lamps were pressed in molds.
Jeremiah went down to a potter’s house and watched him at the wheel: when a vessel went wrong in his hand, he reshaped the clay into another (Jeremiah 18:3–4). Pots were cheap and easily broken, and people rarely carried them when they moved. The broken pieces, potsherds, still had uses — to scoop coals or water (Isaiah 30:14) or to scrape the skin, as Job did. Later people wrote short notes on them; archaeologists call these ostraca, like the letters found at Lachish. Clay jars also kept documents safe (Jeremiah 32:14).
Key verses
So I went down to the potter’s house and saw him working at the wheel. But the vessel that he was shaping from the clay became flawed in his hand; so he formed it into another vessel, as it seemed best for him to do.These were the potters who lived at Netaim and Gederah. They lived there in the service of the king.After conferring together, they used the money to buy the potter’s field as a burial place for foreigners.It will break in pieces like a potter’s jar, shattered so that no fragment can be found. Not a shard will be found in the dust large enough to scoop the coals from a hearth or to skim the water from a cistern.”“This is what the LORD of Hosts, the God of Israel, says: Take these deeds—both the sealed copy and the open copy of the deed of purchase—and put them in a clay jar to preserve them for a long time.How the precious sons of Zion, once worth their weight in pure gold, are now esteemed as jars of clay, the work of a potter’s hands!Sources
Adapted and shortened from the Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary · CC BY-SA 4.0
Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary © 2023 Tyndale House Publishers · CC BY-SA 4.0 — Pottery; Potsherd*; Writing: Potsherds; Writing: Leather, Parchment, and Vellum
Adapted from Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary: articles chosen, shortened and retold in our own words (history, nature and daily life only) and, in languages other than English, machine-translated. The original work by Tyndale House Publishers is available for free at tyndaleopenresources.com.
