sohar

This word never stands on its own. All eight times it appears it sits inside the same two-word phrase, "the house of the sohar," and all eight fall inside one stretch of the Joseph story, Genesis 39 and 40. Whatever the noun once meant by itself, in the Bible it names a single place: the lockup in Egypt where Joseph spent years after his master's wife accused him.

The story defines the place as it introduces it. Genesis 39:20 puts Joseph in "the house of the sohar," then adds at once that this was "the place where the king's prisoners were bound." The rest of the account fills in what kind of place that was:

• it belonged to the household of the captain of the guard, the same official Joseph had been serving (Genesis 40:3)
• it had its own warden, who ended up handing Joseph the running of it (Genesis 39:21 through 39:23)
• it held men of high rank, including Pharaoh's own cupbearer and baker (Genesis 40:5)
• it held people until someone in authority decided their case, not for a fixed number of years

Joseph himself calls the same place something blunter. Twice the narrative drops the formal name and uses the ordinary word for a pit or cistern (בּוֹר): Joseph pleads that they "put me into the pit" (Genesis 40:15), and Pharaoh's messengers rush him "out of the pit" (Genesis 41:14). That is the same word used of the dry cistern his brothers threw him into in Genesis 37, so the echo is hard to miss. The formal phrase says royal detention house; the other word says hole in the ground.

Where the noun itself came from is not settled. One long-standing suggestion links it to a Hebrew root having to do with roundness, which would make the phrase something like "the round house," and a few strictly literal English versions translate it that way. Others think the word belongs with the Egyptian coloring the story keeps up throughout. Either way, what the phrase names is fixed by the sentence that introduces it rather than by its origin.