In the first lyrical and descriptive chapter of the Bible, Moses describes the creation of being. He quotes God using the words “Let there be…” as in “Let there be light” ten times to describe the creation of the firmament and the lights and the waters, etc. The construction ‘let there be’ is interesting because it connotes the ease with which God creates being. He just has to let his plan happen and it does. He uses ‘created’ and ‘made’ eight times to refer to the beasts and cattle and creepy things that Adam and Eve probably stepped on until they learned better, or ignored because they had bigger problems to worry about. (Too bad one of those creepy things didn’t crawl up and eat that stupid apple!) Anyway, notice that in the following quotes, when Moses and others describe how God made man, they use the word ‘formed’, not created or made. Moses thought it important enough to delineate the importance of God’s creation of man from that of animals, etc., that he thought of a word that specifically referred to a trade. A word used by craftsmen. A word that was specific to pottery.

“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” Genesis 2:7 Elihu tells Job in Job 33;6: “…I too am formed from clay.” 1 Timothy 13 “For Adam was formed first, then Eve.”

Pottery plays an important role in our lives and throughout the Bible. In addition to being the container that transports, stores and serves us the sustenance of life, it is often useful for allegorical and parabolic biblical teaching methods. Take this passage from Jeremiah 18:2-6. “Then I went down to the potter’s house, and behold, he was doing a work on the wheels. And the clay pot that he had made spoiled in the potter’s hand; so he made her another vessel again, as he thought fit. to the potter to make it. Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying, ‘Can I not do to you, house of Israel, as this potter does?’ says the Lord. ‘Behold, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are you in mine, O house of Israel’ God tells Jeremiah, priest and prophet, that just as the potter destroys the “broken” vessel to remake it, so He can remake the nation of Israel that has returned to their idolatrous and sinful ways. He continues in verse 8 that if Israel turns from sin, He will “…repent of the evil that I thought to do to them.”

A hundred years earlier, Isaiah foretold the destruction that would befall Israel’s rebels by comparing it to the fall of a wall. (Isaiah 30:13) Isaiah describes a high wall, presumably built of stones. It breaks, swells outward, and drops suddenly, “…in an instant.” I can see him sitting there, writing from the heart, visualizing the fallen wall and thinking to himself, ‘that’s a pretty effective passage, but the editor would like me to spice it up a bit’. He thinks about it for a while and gets an inspiration! Breaking crockery is always dramatic! Verse 14 is born!

He writes: “And he will break it as a potter’s pot breaks that breaks into pieces; he will have no mercy, so that when it bursts, no fragment will be found in it to draw fire from the well, nor to draw water from the well.” He must be happy with himself as he ponders a well-written line: “Break, break, break, and bust. Action words, all packed into one verse! Wow. I’ve got fire and water in there too, not to mention lots of bits.” I hope this makes it through the editing process!”

Psalm 2:9 features a rod of iron and a potter’s vessel. Can you, in your wildest imagination, predict what is about to happen? Well, God is again angry at some heathens and their wicked leaps to “…the ends of the earth.” Then He says to his Son, who by the way, comes to inherit the pagans, … wait for it! Here it comes… “You will break them with a rod of iron; like a potter’s vessel you will break them in pieces.” Being a potter was a pretty good job in the past!

Jeremiah, as disjointed as he seems here, certainly seems to have appreciated the potters. In Lamentations chapter 4, he says of them, something like ‘…the work of the potters’ hands and their clay pots is esteemed and comparable to fine gold.’ High praise, right? It would seem so, however, he begins this verse with “How gold darkens! How the finest gold is changed! The verse after the ‘potters hands’, speaks of sea monsters suckling their young and the cruelty of the ostriches.

One must understand that Jeremiah, the Weeping Prophet, was writing these verses after witnessing the destruction of Jerusalem and the burning of Solomon’s four hundred year old holy temple. We should allow him a bit of melodrama and disorientation as he sees the ruin in the city and the rubble in the streets. But he remembers, he wasn’t so distraught that he forgot to accessorize the pottery!

Zechariah 11 is a dark and threatening prophecy in which Zechariah describes the abject rejection Christ will experience and how Jerusalem will be consumed in the fire of judgment. “Open your doors, O Lebanon, let the fire devour your cedars.” “I will not feed you: whoever dies, let him die; and he who is to be cut off, let him be cut off, and the rest eat each other’s flesh.” This hateful prophecy came true in AD 70. Written five hundred years before Christ, this passage continues to offer a chilling and unsettling foreshadowing of one of the most important and deceptive scenes in the Bible, the one in which Judas Iscariot betrays Christ for thirty pieces of silver. Zechariah continues his prophecy and tells us that the Lord asks: “If it seems good to you, give me my price; and if not, stop doing it. And they weighed thirty pieces of silver for my price.” And the Lord said to me: “Throw it to the potter: a good price…” And I took the thirty pieces of silver and threw them to the potter in the house of the Lord.

When Jesus was condemned by the chief priests; Judas Iscariot, if you’ll remember, was so distraught that he threw the silver pieces at the feet of the chief priests in the temple and went and hanged himself. The chief priests did not keep the money that Judas had thrown. They took advice, they negotiated, and with Judas’ “blood money” they bought the potter’s field to bury the strangers. The potter’s field was the field from which the potters obtained their clay. ‘Potter’s field’ is to this day, the term associated with a burial ground for the destitute and the unknown.

Isaiah was great on the illustrative value of potters and pottery. He could put it simply, as in Chapter 64:8. “But now, O Lord, You are our Father; we are the clay, and You are our Potter; and we are all the work of Your hands.” Or, he could complicate the intended lesson with symbolism and allegory as in Isaiah 29:16: “Surely your investment of things will be counted as potter’s clay; for the work will say of him who made it, ‘He did not make me?’ Or will the framed thing say of him who framed it: ‘He had no understanding’? The previous verse, verse 15, refers to those who have tried to hide their advice and works from God. In other words, he explains in verse 16, they have tried to turn things “upside down” by denying that God knows what they think and do. It is as if the pot were saying to the potter: ‘You did not make me’. Then, to add insult to arrogance, he says ‘even if they ‘framed’ me, they didn’t understand what they ‘framed’. Potters and pottery to the rescue! One more time.

Just as pottery is used throughout the Bible to effectively elucidate abstract theological concepts, actual pottery and pottery shards are used for much more practical purposes as when, in Job 2:8, Job “…took a piece of pot to scrape; and he sat down among the ashes. He used fragments to attack his boils, probably to break them open and release the infection that plagued him in verse 7 “…from the sole of his foot to the top of his head.” I’m sorry I had to subject you to that graphic image, but it had to be done! Plus, it’s in the Bible!! (Rimshot here.) I’m sorry I had to subject you to that gratuitous self-promotion, but it had to be done!

As one would expect of Solomon, he sees the wisdom in using a good pottery simile. Proverbs 26:23 looks deep into an evil heart that speaks evil. He writes,

“Fiery lips and a wicked heart are like a pot covered with silver dross.”

He compares the silver-tongued liar to a defective clay pot whose cracks have been hidden by a layer of cheap silver. He who speaks like this is not sincere.

You are going to love this segue. Crooked, I mean crooked, earthenware jar vendors would seal the cracks in their lower jars with wax and paint them with dross, a cheap silver paint. When the unsuspecting user filled the jar with something warm, the wax would melt and the jar would overflow. The honorable jar sellers didn’t think this was cool because it gave them a bad rap. Therefore, they put up signs for potential buyers that said “Sin Cere”, ‘without wax’. Hence the derivation of the word sincere!

You are sincere?

Francois Maurice

August 2012

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