a wide, shallow bowl of the kind used in worship, shaped to be tipped out rather than drunk from.
The object is broad and low, closer to a serving dish or a saucer than to a cup. Greek writers used the word for the flat gold and silver dishes that held wine poured out as an offering to a god, and the Greek Old Testament uses it for the gold basins that stood in the tabernacle and later in the temple (מִזְרָק). So a first century reader did not picture kitchen ware. The word carried the sanctuary with it: something costly, gold, and made for offering.
The shape is what the New Testament puts to work. A drinking cup (ποτήριον) is lifted to the mouth and sipped; a dish this flat cannot be sipped at all, only tilted and emptied in one motion. That is exactly what happens through Revelation 16, where each angel empties his bowl over one part of the world and the disaster lands at once, with nothing held back and nothing left in the vessel.
The same vessel turns up on both sides of the book, and the pairing is deliberate:
- In Revelation 5:8 the elders hold golden bowls of incense, and the incense is said to be the prayers of God's people, much as an angel later carries incense in a censer (λιβανωτός).
- In Revelation 15 and 16 angels hold golden bowls filled with God's anger, and pour them out over the earth.
Revelation does not keep one vessel for worship and a different one for judgment. The prayers going up and the judgment coming down travel in the same gold dish, which is part of how the book answers the prayers it has recorded.