bedil

• This is the cheap metal mixed into silver that a refiner has to strip out, so it stands for what has to go: when God promises to purge his people, it is rendered "alloy" or "dross", the thing burned away rather than the thing kept.Isa 1:25
• It carries the harder puzzle of the two. In the vision of the temple's rebuilding it is joined to the word for stone in a phrase that occurs only once in the whole Hebrew Bible, naming something held up in Zerubbabel's hand, and readers have taken that object four different ways: a builder's weighted line for checking a wall, an inscribed tin plaque of the kind buried under a new building, a stone set apart, or the chief stone of the finished work. The familiar rendering "plumb line" is one of those guesses rather than the plain sense of the words, and nothing in the verses about lead leaves a reader this unsure of what is meant.Zec 4:10

• Both belong to the standard short list of hard metals, alongside gold, silver, bronze, and iron, that can be passed through fire to be made clean rather than washed with water.Num 31:22
• Both are named together among the base metals thrown into the furnace when silver is melted down, and Ezekiel uses that whole heap as a picture of a people who are worth far less than they claim.Ezk 22:18Ezk 22:20
• Both were ordinary cargo with a market price, shipped in from distant ports and swapped for goods in the same breath as silver and iron.Ezk 27:12

• It is picked for sheer heaviness, the metal a writer reaches for when something must sink or stay put: Egypt's soldiers go down in the sea like it, and a heavy disc of it is clapped over the mouth of a basket so what is inside cannot get out.Exo 15:10Zec 5:8Zec 5:7
• Because it melts easily and then hardens in place, it is poured into letters cut in rock so a record will last, which is why Job wishes his words were set down with it.Job 19:24
• In the refiner's fire it is the working metal that is fed to the flames and used up in the attempt to pull silver out of the ore, not the impurity being pulled out.Jer 6:29

• It names a real, valuable metal in its own right, tin, counted among the metals taken as spoil and traded as a commodity, not merely something thrown away.Num 31:22Ezk 27:12
• In one verse it is joined to the word for stone in a phrase that occurs only there, naming something held up in Zerubbabel's hand while the temple was being rebuilt. What that object was has never been settled: it has been read as a builder's weighted line, as an inscribed tin plaque of the kind rulers buried in a building's foundations, as a stone set apart, and as the chief stone of the finished work. Whichever reading is right, this word can be stretched to name a solid thing someone holds, which never happens to the refuse of the furnace.Zec 4:10

• In the furnace of God's judgment both stand for the impurity burned out of his people, what the refiner's fire removes to leave them clean.Isa 1:25Ezk 22:18

• It always names the worthless refuse that smelting drives off, the impurity removed so pure metal can come out, never a metal worth anything on its own.Pro 25:4
• It is the standard picture of what is degraded or cast off: silver gone bad, the wicked skimmed away and discarded, or a cheap silvery scum glazed over a clay pot.Isa 1:22Psa 119:119Pro 26:23

• Is the ordinary Hebrew word for tin, listed matter-of-factly among the common metals gathered for use, alongside gold, silver, bronze, iron, and lead.Num 31:22Ezk 27:12
• Names the base metal or dross skimmed off in smelting, the impurity separated out from silver when the furnace does its work.Isa 1:25Ezk 22:18Ezk 22:20
• Serves as the everyday word even for the plummet stone in Zechariah's vision, so where Amos reached for the rare term, Zechariah used this common one.Zec 4:10

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• Belongs to a single scene: it appears only in Amos's fourth vision, where the Lord stands on a wall holding this object and sets it "in the midst of my people Israel" as the sign that judgment will no longer be held back.Amo 7:7Amo 7:8
• Its very sense is unsettled, read by ancient and modern interpreters as "tin," "lead," or a builder's "plumb line," so the word is itself a crux of interpretation rather than a fixed name for a substance.Amo 7:8