to shape something into a form the way a potter shapes clay: to form, fashion, mold.
This is the craftsman's word for making, and its home picture is the potter at the wheel: hands pressing wet clay until a lump becomes a jar. The active form of this very verb is the ordinary Hebrew word for "potter," so the workshop is never far from view. That is what sets it apart from the word for creating (בָּרָא), which never names the material God works with, and from the broad everyday word for making or doing (עָשָׂה), which says only that something got done.
From that workshop the word reaches out in every direction, and the same picture keeps doing new work:
- God shapes the first human out of the dust of the ground, then shapes the animals.
- God shapes a person in the womb, so that being made and being called are one act.
- God shapes the world and all that fills it: mountains, the sea and its creatures, light and dark, even the eye and the human spirit.
- God shapes Israel, and the prophets keep calling the nation his handiwork.
- Someone shapes a plan, settling a course of action long before it is carried out.
That last step is where scholars watch the word most closely. In a good many verses nothing is being physically molded at all, and the sense runs nearer to deciding or ordaining: God says he shaped an event long ago and is now bringing it to pass. Some read those verses as the potter picture still working quietly in the background, while others think the picture has gone flat there and the word simply means to determine something in advance.
Isaiah then turns the word against idol worship with open irony. It describes the workman who shapes a god out of wood or metal, and the point lands hard: a thing you shape with your own hands cannot be the God who shaped you. The Greek Old Testament kept the picture by rendering the verb with the Greek word for molding (πλάσσω), which is how the potter and his clay carry over into the New Testament.
Nuances
Whether the potter image is vividly at work in the forming of the first human, or muted.
- contestedThe scene is a potter at work, the verb's home image, shaping a human figure by hand.; Benedikt Otzen, "yatsar," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, vol. 6 (1990), 257-65
- contestedThe image is muted: the material named is dust rather than the potter's clay, and the text never calls God a potter or speaks of his hands.; Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1-17 (NICOT, 1990); John H. Walton, The Lost World of Adam and Eve (IVP Academic, 2015), 72
Disputed
How much of the concrete potter image is still active in any given occurrence of the verb.
- contestedThe potter and his clay remain the live picture behind the verb, including in its theological uses, so "form, shape" is the right rendering throughout.; Benedikt Otzen, "yatsar," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, vol. 6 (1990), 257-65; BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), s.v. יצר
- contestedIn more than half the occurrences the context has nothing to do with shaping material, and the verb is better rendered "prepare," "ordain," or "decree."; John H. Walton, The Lost World of Adam and Eve (IVP Academic, 2015), 72