charcoal: wood burned down to black fuel, used to raise a fire to high heat
Charcoal is not dug out of the ground; it is made. Wood is burned slowly under a covering so that the sap and moisture cook out of it and what is left is light, black, and able to burn far hotter than the wood it came from. That black fuel is what this word names. Hebrew keeps a separate word for the red, glowing embers charcoal gives off once it is lit (גַּחֶלֶת), and the two are not interchangeable: one is the material you add, the other is the heat you get.
Two of its three appearances are workshop scenes, and both turn on a practical fact of the trade: iron cannot be worked over an ordinary wood fire. It takes charcoal, with air forced into it, to reach the temperature at which metal softens enough to shape. Isaiah uses that detail twice, first to mock the man who sweats over his charcoal and hammers out a god for himself (Isaiah 44:12), then to steady a frightened city with the reminder that the God who made the smith and his charcoal fire also governs whatever comes off that anvil (Isaiah 54:16).
The third appearance turns the same fact into a proverb. Charcoal is what you add to get embers, wood is what you add to get flame, and a quarrelsome person, Proverbs 26:21 says, is what you add to get a fight. The line works only because charcoal is the cause and not the result: the argumentative man is not merely standing near the trouble, he is the fuel underneath it.
Whether the word in Proverbs 26:21 is "charcoal" as the received Hebrew text has it, or should be emended to a word meaning "bellows."
- majorityKeep the received Hebrew text and read "charcoal," the fuel that produces embers, which is what makes the proverb's fuel-to-fire logic work.; Preliminary and Interim Report on the Hebrew Old Testament Text Project, United Bible Societies (rating B for the Masoretic reading); Michael V. Fox, Proverbs 10-31, Anchor Yale Bible 18B (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Bruce K. Waltke, The Book of Proverbs: Chapters 15-31, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005)
- minorityThe sense of the line is uncertain, and a word meaning "bellows" may be read in place of "charcoal."; Matthew Black and H. H. Rowley, eds., Peake's Commentary on the Bible (London: Nelson, 1962)
Disputed
Whether the noun is derived from a root meaning "to be black" or is an inherited primary noun for coal.
- majorityAn inherited primary noun for coal, reflecting Proto-Semitic *paḥm- ~ *piḥām-, with a full cognate set across East, Northwest, and South Semitic; not a deverbal formation.; Martin Lang, "Kohle," in Das wissenschaftliche Bibellexikon im Internet (WiBiLex), Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2013; Alexander Militarev and Leonid Kogan, Semitic Etymological Dictionary, no. 803
- minorityPerhaps from an unused root meaning "to be black," so that blackness is the underlying idea.; BDB, s.v. פֶּחָם