a pot: a large open vessel for cooking, temple service, or washing
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This is the ordinary word for a pot, the wide-mouthed vessel that sat over a fire. Most often it is a cooking pot for boiling stew or meat, which is why it shows up in kitchen scenes and in vivid pictures of a city boiling over with judgment.
The same object turns up in two specialized settings. In the tabernacle and temple it names the bronze pots or pans used to clear the greasy ashes off the altar, listed among the sacred equipment beside shovels and basins. In a pair of psalms it is a washpot, a basin for rinsing the feet, used as an image of contempt when God calls Moab his washpot.
These are the same object seen from different angles: a sturdy open vessel, whether it holds a meal, temple ashes, or wash water.
Nuances
1aa cooking pot for boiling food over a fire, also used as an image of seething judgment
1ca washpot, a basin for washing, used as an image of contempt
Psa 60:8(10)Psa 108:9(10)
2
a thorn or thornbush; also a thorn-shaped hook
TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintyStrong
Spelled exactly like the word for a pot, this is an entirely separate word meaning a thorn or thornbush. Dry thorns were the quick, worthless fuel of the ancient world, blazing up loudly and burning out fast, and several passages use them that way as a picture of things that flare up and come to nothing.
From the idea of a sharp point the word stretches once to name a hook. In one passage in Amos it describes the hooks on which a conquered people are dragged away, though that reading is debated.
Because the two words look identical, a writer could play them against each other. Ecclesiastes does exactly that, comparing the empty laughter of fools to thorns crackling under a pot and setting the two meanings side by side in a single line.
Nuances
2aa thorn or thornbush, especially dry thorns gathered and burned as cheap fuel
Always a thorny wild plant, and the stock image of the worthless brier that reaches above its station, as in the thistle that dared to challenge the cedar.2Ki 14:92Ch 25:18
The brier of poetic contrast: the thorn set against the lily, or the thistle that springs up where good grain should grow.Sng 2:2Job 31:40
sir in the other biblical languages
χαλκίονGreek“kettle”the Greek word for a bronze kettle or pot rinsed for ritual purity, a close counterpart to this word's cooking and temple pots.
The everyday cooking pot set on the fire to boil food.Exo 16:32Ki 4:38
Turned into vivid pictures: a boiling pot standing for a city under judgment, and a wash basin standing for a conquered nation's disgrace.Ezk 24:3Psa 60:8
Both
Both name a metal vessel kept in the household for holding and preparing food.Mrk 7:4Exo 16:3
Names the vessel by its metal (a copper or bronze container) and appears in the setting of ceremonial washing, among the pots and cups the devout rinsed for purity.Mrk 7:4
ἄκανθαGreek“a thorn”the standard Greek word for thorns, as in the crown of thorns, matching this word's thorn sense.
Chiefly names a cooking pot or cauldron, a household and temple vessel for boiling, a sense the Greek thorn word never carries.Exo 16:32Ki 4:38Jer 1:13
Can also mean a hook, the barb by which captives are dragged off.Amo 4:2
Both
Where the Hebrew word means thorns rather than a pot, it lines up with the Greek: both name wild thorny brush, worthless growth fit only to crackle in the fire.Ecc 7:6Heb 6:8
Purely a thorn or thornbush: the wild plant that chokes a crop, that is woven into a mocking crown, and that a field yields when it is worthless.Mat 13:7Mat 27:29Heb 6:8
What scholars say about sir
The lexicons treat this as two homonyms sharing a form. HALOT and BDB list a masculine noun meaning cooking pot or vessel (also a washbasin and the temple ash pans) and a separate noun meaning thorn or thornbush, with a probable extension to hook in Amos 4:2. The pot noun is distributed across narrative, cultic inventory lists, and prophetic caldron imagery (Ezekiel 11 and 24; Jeremiah 1:13); the thorn noun clusters in poetic and prophetic contexts where dry thorns are cheap fuel. Ecclesiastes 7:6 exploits the shared form in a paronomasia. The chief disputed point is Amos 4:2, where the phrase is read as fishhooks by most, though the syntax and the sense of the second noun remain contested.