Bottle

A "bottle" in the UPDV is most often a wineskin — a vessel sewn from animal hide that carried water, milk, or wine on the road or in the household. A second class is the narrow-mouthed earthen flask, fired from clay and brittle in the prophet's hand. A third, more poetic, is the lachrymatory image: a bottle for tears. Each kind shows up at a particular hinge of the story — sustenance for the cast-out, provision on the march, a sign-act of broken judgment, a figure for life withered in smoke, the stretched-skin image used of new teaching that cannot be put back inside the old.

Skin-bottles for the Journey

Bottles in narrative contexts are skins, slung on the shoulder or loaded on a donkey, holding water or wine for travel. The first appearance is the most pointed: when Sarah's demand drives Hagar from Abraham's house, what Abraham gives her is bread "and a bottle of water" — minimal provision for a wilderness journey: "And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and took bread and a bottle of water, and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, and [gave her] the boy, and sent her away. And she departed, and wandered in the wilderness of Beer-sheba" (Gen 21:14).

The same kind of skin-vessel turns up at the Kenite tent. Sisera, fleeing the rout at Kishon, asks Jael for water, and she opens a bottle of milk: "Give me, I pray you, a little water to drink; for I am thirsty. And she opened a bottle of milk, and gave him drink, and covered him" (Jg 4:19).

Wine in skins recurs in the Samuel narratives. Hannah brings her young son to Shiloh with "a three-year-old bull, and one ephah of meal, and a bottle of wine" (1 Sa 1:24). Abigail intercepts David with two hundred loaves and "two bottles of wine" (1 Sa 25:18). Ziba meets the fleeing David at the top of the ascent with bread, raisins, summer fruits, and "a bottle of wine" (2 Sa 16:1). The bottle is the standard provision-vessel of the road — small enough to carry, capacious enough to matter when bread alone is not sustenance.

Made of Animal Skins

That these are skin-bottles is made explicit in the Gibeonite ruse, where worn-out wineskins are produced as proof of a long journey: "they also worked craftily, and went and made as if they had been ambassadors, and took old sacks on their donkeys, and wineskins, old and rent and bound up" (Jos 9:4); their words to Joshua follow the same line — "and these wineskins, which we filled, were new; and, look, they are rent: and these garments of ours and our sandals have become old by reason of the very long journey" (Jos 9:13).

The skin-bottle that splits or hardens with age becomes a stock figure for inward pressure and outward exhaustion. Elihu, full of words he cannot keep in, casts his speech as fermenting wine in a sealed skin: "Look, my breast is as wine which has no vent; / Like blacksmith's bellows it is ready to burst" (Job 32:19). The psalmist of the long Torah-meditation uses the opposite figure — a skin-bottle hung above the cooking-fire, blackened, shrunken, and dry: "For I have become like a wineskin in the smoke; / Yet I don't forget your statutes" (Ps 119:83).

New Wine in Old Wineskins

The same property of skins — that they stretch once and cannot stretch again — drives the dominical saying preserved in Mark and Luke. New wine, still working, would split a skin already stretched to its limit; the result is loss of both. Mark's form: "And no man puts new wine into old wineskins; else the wine will burst the skins, and the wine perishes, and the skins: but [they put] new wine into fresh wineskins" (Mr 2:22). Luke's parallel keeps the same logic: "And no man puts new wine into old wineskins; else the new wine will burst the skins, and itself will be spilled, and the skins will perish. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins" (Lu 5:37-38). The figure presupposes the literal practice already documented across the Hebrew narratives — a household kept its skins, used them once for fresh wine, and could not safely refill them.

Made of Clay

Alongside the skin-bottle, the UPDV records a distinct vessel: the potter's earthen flask. Where the skin gives way by stretching, the clay vessel gives way by shattering, and prophetic speech mostly reaches for the second image when the point is irreversible breakage.

Isaiah pictures the collapse of a wall as the smashing of a potter's jar so thorough that no usable shard remains: "And he will break it as a potter's vessel is broken, breaking it in pieces without sparing; so that there will not be found among its pieces a sherd with which to take fire from the hearth, or to dip up water out of the cistern" (Is 30:14).

Jeremiah turns the same image into a sign-act. Yahweh sends him to buy a clay flask — a footnote in the UPDV identifies it as "a narrow-mouthed ceramic jar used for drinking water" — and to take elders with him as witnesses: "This is what Yahweh said, Go, and buy a potter's earthen bottle, and [take] of the elders of the people, and of the elders of the priests" (Je 19:1). After the oracle in the valley of Hinnom comes the act itself: "Then you will break the bottle in the sight of the men who go with you" (Je 19:10). The judgment on Moab is given in the same vocabulary: "Therefore, look, the days come, says Yahweh, that I will send to him those who pour off, and they will pour him off; and they will empty his vessels, and break their bottles in pieces" (Je 48:12).

A Bottle for Tears

The strangest UPDV use of the word is in a lament psalm, where the sufferer asks Yahweh to gather his weeping into a vessel and keep it: "You number my wanderings: / Put my tears into your bottle; / Are they not in your book?" (Ps 56:8). The verse uses the bottle as a lachrymatory — a receptacle for tears. It is the same noun as the skin or the clay flask, turned to a remarkable figure — the wandering and weeping of the petitioner are not lost; they are counted, bottled, and recorded.