kos

This word starts out as a plain word for an actual cup people drank from. Pharaoh's cupbearer holds Pharaoh's cup in his dream (Genesis 40), a poor man in one of Nathan's parables shares his own cup with his pet lamb (2 Samuel 12:3), and Jeremiah sets cups of wine before the Rechabites to test their loyalty to an old family vow (Jeremiah 35:5). Solomon's builders even borrowed the shape for architecture: the rim of the great bronze basin in the temple courtyard was cast like the brim of a cup, like the flower of a lily (1 Kings 7:26), so its wide, curved lip flared out the way a cup does.

In the Prophets and several Psalms, the same word becomes one of the Bible's most vivid pictures of judgment. God hands someone a cup, and drinking it brings staggering drunkenness, public shame, and collapse, not because the cup holds poison but because the wine stands in for overwhelming punishment (Isaiah 51:17, 22; Jeremiah 25:15, 17, 28; 49:12; 51:7; Ezekiel 23:31, 32, 33; Lamentations 4:21; Habakkuk 2:16; Psalm 75:8; Psalm 11:6). The cup keeps moving from nation to nation: Jerusalem drinks it first, then it passes on to Babylon and the other nations that wronged her, so that whoever once made others stagger will stagger in turn.

The very same picture flips the other way in several Psalms. There the cup is not something forced on an enemy but the good portion God gives someone who trusts him: the LORD himself is called my cup (Psalm 16:5), my cup overflows at a table God has spread (Psalm 23:5), and a worshiper lifts the cup of salvation in thanksgiving after being rescued (Psalm 116:13). Jeremiah 16:7 uses the same image gently, for the cup of comfort a family would customarily offer someone mourning a death.

What ties every use together is not the taste of the wine but whose hand is pouring. A cup is simply what is given to a person to drink, and the word lets the Bible's writers ask the same question again and again: what has God put in your cup? Sometimes the answer is deserved judgment, sometimes overflowing blessing, but either way a person's fate arrives already poured, ready to be received.

Three times the Bible uses these same three letters for a different word altogether: a small nocturnal bird on the list of creatures the law forbids eating (Leviticus 11:17; Deuteronomy 14:16), and, in the plea of a lonely psalmist, a bird whose cry haunts the ruins at night, as when he says he has become like an owl among the ruins (Psalm 102:6).

This is not a second shade of meaning for cup, but an entirely separate word that happens to be spelled the same way. It is a masculine noun, while cup is feminine, and it has no cup-related relatives in the other ancient languages related to Hebrew. Scholars generally think the bird's name imitates its call rather than describing anything about a cup. Most English Bibles render it little owl or simply owl, though which exact species the biblical writers had in mind is not perfectly certain.