StrongerBible

mizlagah

מִזְלָגָה

HebrewH4207“fork, fleshhook, ...”

Appears 7 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Exo 27:3Exo 38:3Num 4:141Sa 2:131Sa 2:141Ch 28:172Ch 4:16
Word studyResearch-grademaz-LEGnoun

What mizlagah means

a metal fork with several prongs, used to lift and turn sacrificial meat over a fire or out of a boiling pot

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

A fork of this kind was a working tool, not tableware. It was made of bronze and belonged to a small set of implements built for the altar, alongside the pots, the shovel (יָעֶה) for clearing ash, the basins (מִזְרָק) that caught blood, and the pans (מַחְתָּה) that carried live coals. Its job was meat: lifting a portion of a sacrifice off the fire or out of a boiling pot, turning it over, and moving it where it needed to go.

Only one passage shows the fork in somebody's hand, and it is the reason many readers know the word at all. At the shrine in Shiloh the servant of Eli's sons would come while the meat was still boiling, carrying a fork with three teeth, and jab it into the pot to take whatever came up, before God's portion had been burned. That is the one place the tool gets described rather than simply listed, and the description matches what the earliest translators understood: a metal fork with several prongs, long enough to reach into a cauldron.

Everywhere else the word is a line item, and the lists disagree about the metal. In the tabernacle accounts and in the record of Solomon's temple the forks are bronze, but David's plan for the temple in 1 Chronicles 28:17 calls for them in pure gold, the only place the Bible says so. Scholars account for the difference in several ways, from two separate sets of forks for two areas of the temple to editorial layers left unresolved, and none of the explanations has won general agreement.

Exo 27:3Exo 38:3Num 4:141Sa 2:131Sa 2:141Ch 28:172Ch 4:16

What scholars say about mizlagah

Lexicographers converge on the referent and divide only over the etymology. BDB (p. 272) lists the masculine מַזְלֵג of 1 Sam 2:13-14 and the feminine byform מִזְלָגָה in adjacent entries while declining to reconstruct any Hebrew verbal base; TWOT §552a treats the noun as the sole survivor of an unused root, reconstructing "to draw up, pull out" purely from function; DCH V (Stec) catalogues all seven biblical occurrences plus Ben Sira and Mishnah Kelim 13:2, cross-references the metathetic byform מַלְגֵּז, and refuses etymological speculation. HALOT and the 18th-edition Gesenius ("dreizackige Gabel") supply the comparative set: post-biblical Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic זלג "to drip", Syriac zlaḡ, Arabic zalaǧa "to glide", Akkadian mazlagu, and Arabic mizlāǧ "sliding bolt". All treat the word as an instrument noun with mem-preformative, the feminine an augmented form of the same pattern. The strongest external anchor is Old Assyrian mazlagum in five 19th-century Kültepe tablets (CAD M/I 438, "a fork or hook"; AHw 637, "Dreizack"), with dense Jewish Aramaic, Syriac and Christian Palestinian Aramaic continuity but a conspicuous absence from Ugaritic, Phoenician-Punic and Ge'ez, which points to a Mesopotamian and Aramaic technical vocabulary rather than a West-Semitic pedigree. The versional witness is unanimous: κρεάγρα at all seven occurrences (in Attic comedy a household flesh-hook, per LSJ, with the compound κρεάγρα τριόδους at 1 Kingdoms 2:13), Targumic and Syriac cognates throughout, and Vulgate fuscinula with tridentem in apposition at 1 Sam 2:13; Wevers reads this as the mapping of sanctuary hardware onto ordinary Hellenistic domestic vocabulary. Commentators take the Exod 27:3 inventory as a fixed five-item bronze list keyed to stages of the burnt offering (Propp; Levine; Milgrom, who explains the fork's function by direct appeal to 1 Sam 2:13, an implement for lifting and rearranging portions on the altar grate), and 1 Chr 28:17's זָהָב טָהוֹר as an amplification of the bronze standard (Japhet, Klein, Knoppers), left unharmonized against the נְחֹשֶׁת מָרוּק of 2 Chr 4:16. On 1 Sam 2:13-14 McCarter reads מִשְׁפַּט הַכֹּהֲנִים pejoratively, as an unlawful custom the Shiloh priests had established against Lev 7:29-34 and Deut 18:3, while Tsumura defends MT and separates vv. 13-14 (a greedy but not overtly illegal expansion of the priestly portion) from v. 15 (flagrant desecration); Polzin pairs מִשְׁפַּט הַכֹּהֲנִים with מִשְׁפַּט הַמֶּלֶךְ of 1 Sam 8:11. Comparative archaeology supplies Late Bronze and Early Iron Age Aegean, Cypriot and Levantine bronze tridents and flesh-hooks within a broader feasting assemblage of spits, tongs, ladles and cauldrons (Catling; Gershuny; Needham and Bowman), yet no Iron Age Israelite example has been securely identified in the published record, a gap most read as taphonomic rather than evidence against the object.

Where scholars disagree about mizlagah

Which root the noun derives from, and therefore what the instrument name originally pictured.

  • contestedThe base is the root that means "to drip, trickle" in post-biblical Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic, so the noun is literally a dripper, a fork that lifts meat while the liquid runs off it.; M. Jastrow, A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature, p. 755; E. Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language (Carta, 1987), s.v. מַזְלֵג
  • contestedThe base is the Semitic root behind Arabic zalaǧa "to glide, slip", the same root that yields mizlāǧ "sliding bolt", making the noun an instrument name built on sliding rather than dripping.; HALOT, vol. 2, s.v. מַזְלֵג; Gesenius, Hebräisches und Aramäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament, 18th ed. (Springer, 2013), s.v. מַזְלֵג
  • contestedNo verbal base is attested in Biblical Hebrew, so no derivation can be established; the noun should be handled as an inherited pan-Semitic technical term whose sense is recoverable only from function and cognates.; BDB, p. 272, s.v. מַזְלֵג; TWOT §552a; D. J. A. Clines (ed.), The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew V (Sheffield, 2001), s.v. מזלג
In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • HALOT, vol. 2, s.v. מַזְלֵג / מִזְלָגָהlexicon
  • BDB, p. 272, s.v. מַזְלֵג and [מִזְלָגָה]lexicon
  • D. J. A. Clines (ed.), The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew V (Sheffield, 2001), s.v. מזלג (entry by D. Stec)lexicon
  • TWOT §552a, s.v. מַזְלֵגlexicon
  • Gesenius, Hebräisches und Aramäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament, 18th ed., ed. Rüterswörden, Meyer and Donner (Springer, 2013), s.v. מַזְלֵגlexicon
  • The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CAD) M/I, p. 438, s.v. mazlagulexicon
  • W. von Soden, Akkadisches Handwörterbuch, p. 637, s.v. mazlagulexicon
  • LSJ, s.v. κρεάγραlexicon
  • T. Muraoka, A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint (Peeters, 2009), s.v. κρεάγραlexicon
  • M. Jastrow, A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature, p. 755, s.v. מַזְלֵגlexicon
  • E. Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language (Carta, 1987), s.v. מַזְלֵגlexicon
  • W. H. C. Propp, Exodus 19-40 (Anchor Bible 2A; Doubleday, 2006), pp. 420-425commentary
  • J. Milgrom, Numbers (JPS Torah Commentary; JPS, 1990), pp. 26-27commentary
  • B. A. Levine, Numbers 1-20 (Anchor Bible 4; Doubleday, 1993), pp. 168-170commentary
  • C. Houtman, Exodus, vol. 3 (Historical Commentary on the Old Testament; Peeters, 2000), on 27:3commentary
  • P. K. McCarter, I Samuel (Anchor Bible 8; Doubleday, 1980), pp. 82-84commentary
  • D. T. Tsumura, The First Book of Samuel (NICOT; Eerdmans, 2007), pp. 152-158commentary
  • S. Japhet, I & II Chronicles (Old Testament Library; SCM, 1993), pp. 494-496commentary
  • R. W. Klein, 1 Chronicles (Hermeneia; Fortress, 2006), pp. 511-515commentary
  • G. N. Knoppers, 1 Chronicles 10-29 (Anchor Bible 12A; Doubleday, 2004), pp. 921-934commentary
  • M. Haran, Temples and Temple-Service in Ancient Israel (Oxford, 1978)monograph
  • R. Polzin, Samuel and the Deuteronomist: 1 Samuel (Indiana University Press, 1989)monograph
  • J. W. Wevers, Notes on the Greek Text of Exodus (SCS 30; Scholars Press, 1990), on 27:3monograph
  • S. P. Needham and S. Bowman, "Flesh-hooks, technological complexity and the Atlantic Bronze Age feasting complex", European Journal of Archaeology 8/2 (2005): 93-136article
  • H. W. Catling, Cypriot Bronzework in the Mycenaean World (Clarendon, 1964)monograph
  • L. Gershuny, Bronze Vessels from Israel and Jordan (Prähistorische Bronzefunde II.6; C. H. Beck, 1985)monograph

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of מִזְלָגָה

f p absolute

מִּזְלָגוֹת, מִּזְלָגֹת

1Ch 28:17, 2Ch 4:16, Exo 38:3, Num 4:14

m s absolute

מַּזְלֵג

1Sa 2:13, 1Sa 2:14

f p construct

מִזְלְגֹתָיו

Exo 27:3