bronze or copper: the hard metal, named almost always in poetry, both for real bronze things and for whatever refuses to give way
Ancient Israel had two words for the same reddish metal. One is the ordinary, everyday word for it (נְחֹשֶׁת), and it fills the building lists of the Tabernacle and the Temple: pillars, basins, altars, tent pegs. This one is its poetic twin. It never turns up in an inventory. Ten of its eleven appearances are in poems, five of them in Job, and the remaining one is the covenant warning of Leviticus 26, which is itself high, rhythmic speech.
It also keeps unusually fixed company. In eight of eleven verses it stands beside iron (בַּרְזֶל), the two metals together forming a single picture of what cannot be worn down:
- skies of iron above and ground of bronze below, in the covenant warning of Leviticus 26:19
- iron pulled from the dust and copper poured out of stone, in Job's account of mining in Job 28:2
- a neck of iron sinew and a forehead of bronze, in Isaiah's portrait of a stubborn people in Isaiah 48:4
- a horn of iron and hooves of bronze, on the threshing ox of Micah 4:13
So the word runs along two closely joined tracks. Sometimes it names actual metal: copper smelted out of ore, the bronze doors God promises to break open for Cyrus, the bow an archer draws. Sometimes it names the quality that metal stands for: bones that will not snap, ground that will not soften, a face that will not blush. The second use grows straight out of the first, which is why one word covers both.