nesekh

This is the common biblical word for a drink offering, a measured amount of wine poured out at the altar alongside an animal or grain offering. It belongs to the settled worship of Israel: the law fixes the exact amount of wine to pour with each sacrifice (a quarter of a hin for a lamb, more for a ram or a bull), and it is a daily rite, poured morning and evening. The pouring is old and deeply rooted; long before the law, Jacob poured out a drink offering on the standing stone he set up at Bethel. When Joel wants to picture worship at God's house collapsing under a plague of locusts, the sign he reaches for is that the grain offering and the drink offering have been cut off, and the priests are in mourning.

The same word also names the poured offering when it is given to the wrong god. When people pour out drink offerings on the rooftops to the Queen of Heaven, or at hillside shrines to other gods, the word is still a drink offering: what has changed is who receives it, not what the act is. The prophets use the identical worship word on purpose, to expose the illicit rite as a counterfeit of the real thing.

Because the offering is defined by being poured out, the word can stretch to any liquid set apart for God this way, including the drink offering Jacob poured over his memorial stone.

In a handful of prophetic passages the same spelling names something else made by pouring, only here the poured material is molten metal, not wine. A cast idol was formed by pouring liquid metal into a mold, and the word points to the finished image. The two senses share the picture of pouring, which is almost certainly why one word carries both, but the things meant are completely different, and a reader needs a different English word for each.

The prophets use this sense to mock the making of idols. Isaiah sets the cast image beside the carved image as twin proof that the idol maker has no real god, and Jeremiah says the metalworker is put to shame because the image he poured is a fraud, with no breath in it.