mashqeh

This is the word's most common use, and nine of its nineteen appearances fall in one story, the account of Joseph in Egypt. It names the servant who poured and tasted the king's wine, but in the ancient world that was no minor job. A royal cupbearer stood close to the king every day, sampled his cup as a guard against poison, and became a trusted companion whose quiet influence could outweigh that of higher-titled men.

That is why the same word covers three of the most powerful courts in the Bible: Pharaoh's chief cupbearer in Genesis, the gold-served table of Solomon, and Nehemiah, who served wine to the Persian king Artaxerxes and used his standing to win permission to rebuild Jerusalem. The office carried enough weight that Nehemiah names it as the credential that got him the king's ear.

The word can also point to the position itself rather than the person holding it. When Pharaoh restores the chief cupbearer, the text says he was put back onto his cupbearer's post, naming the office as a role one can be appointed to and removed from.

A caution for readers of older Bibles: the King James Version calls this man a "butler," which today suggests a household servant in charge of the pantry. That is much too small. This was a high officer of a royal court, not a domestic servant.

Here the word shifts from the person who serves drink to the drink itself, any liquid poured out to be consumed. It is the ordinary word a reader would reach for: what fills the cup rather than who carries it.

One use sits in Israel's purity laws, where any drink inside an unclean vessel is itself made unclean. Later Jewish teaching built its list of the liquids that can transmit impurity partly on this verse. Another use is a picture of cruelty: withholding drink from the thirsty. And in the inventory of Solomon's splendor the word names the king's drinking service, the gold vessels from which drink was poured.

This sense is the plainest of the three. A near neighbor is the word for a drinking feast or banquet (מִשְׁתֶּה), which names the whole occasion of feasting rather than the drink in the cup.

The same root that gives water to a guest gives water to the ground, and in this sense the word describes land that is thoroughly watered. When Lot looks out over the Jordan valley and chooses it for himself, the text says the whole plain was well-watered, and it reaches for two of the lushest images the Bible has: the garden of the LORD and the land of Egypt. Readers have long heard in that description an echo of Eden, the place watered throughout.

This is the rarest sense. Its one clear appearance is Lot's view of the Jordan plain. A second possible appearance, in Ezekiel, is uncertain: the wording there is difficult and the ancient translations read it differently, so scholars are divided over whether the word even stands in that verse.