ḥomer

This is the everyday word for the moist, formless earth that human hands work. The same material shows up in three settings, and English reaches for a different word in each: the potter's clay on the wheel, the wet mortar smeared between mud bricks, and the mire churned up in a street or a pit.

Because it is the stuff a potter molds, this word carries some of the Bible's most vivid pictures of God and people. We are the clay and God is the potter who forms, breaks, and reshapes us (Isaiah 64:8; Jeremiah 18:6). Job returns to it again and again to say that a human being is only handled earth, made from clay and destined to crumble back into it (Job 10:9; Job 33:6).

The building sense is just as ordinary. Israel's slavery in Egypt was spent in mortar and brick (Exodus 1:14), and the same word names the wet clay that seals a wall or a brick kiln (Nahum 3:14). When it is trampled underfoot rather than worked, translators render it mire, the muck of the streets that an army tramples down (Isaiah 10:6).

A second, unrelated use of the same spelling means simply a heap or pile. After the plague of frogs died off, the Egyptians raked them into stinking heaps (Exodus 8:14). The word may also describe the piling or surging up of great waters as God drives them back (Habakkuk 3:15), though that verse is read in more than one way.

This sense has nothing to do with clay. It is a separate word that happens to be written the same, and it is recognized mainly by its context of gathering and piling.

A third use of this spelling is a unit of dry volume, the homer, used to measure grain and produce. It was the biggest common measure, equal to about ten ephahs or ten baths, so a homer of seed or barley is a large, bulk quantity (Leviticus 27:16; Hosea 3:2). Ezekiel makes the homer the benchmark for a fair, standardized set of weights and measures (Ezekiel 45:11).

Readers should not confuse the homer with the omer, a much smaller measure spelled differently in Hebrew. An omer is only a tenth of an ephah, while a homer is about ten ephahs, so the two differ roughly a hundredfold despite looking almost identical in English. The English word homer here has nothing to do with any modern use of that name.