a wide, round, open container: a pot boiled over a fire, or a basket carried by hand
What holds this word's two uses together is a shape, not a material or a job. It names a wide, round, open-mouthed container, big enough to reach into with both hands. Set it on the coals and it boils meat. Fill it with figs or bricks and someone carries it off. Hebrew names the vessel by its form and lets the setting decide what it holds.
That is why the same noun turns up in scenes with nothing else in common:
- at the sanctuary in Shiloh, a servant jabs a three-pronged fork into it to spear boiling meat
- in the poem about Leviathan, smoke pours from the creature's nostrils like steam off one fanned over a fire
- Jehu's officers pack seventy severed heads into them and ship them to Jezreel
- Jeremiah sees two of them set out in front of the temple, one holding early ripe figs and one holding figs too rotten to eat
Behind all four is one object, and a reader of an English Bible meets four different words.
The usual word for a cooking pot is סִיר, which is several times more common, and the usual word for a woven basket is סַל. This one sits between them. When 1 Samuel 2:14 sets four vessels side by side and 2 Chronicles 35:13 sets three, it is one item in a kitchen inventory, told apart from its neighbors by size and shape rather than by what it is for.