Charger

The charger of older English Bibles is, in its plain sense, a flat metal serving-platter — the kind of broad, shallow dish on which food was carried to a table or a sacrifice was presented at an altar. In UPDV the word is rendered "platter," and the vessel surfaces in three distinct settings: as the leading vessel in the twelve-day dedication of the tabernacle altar, as a counted item in the inventory of returning temple-vessels under Cyrus, and as a household dish whose outside-only cleansing serves as a parable of Pharisaic religion. The same metal-dish vocabulary appears alongside related sanctuary furniture — the gold dishes of the showbread table, the bowls and spoons that travel with them — and at the dinner table in a Sirach proverb on courteous reaching.

Twelve Silver Platters at the Altar's Dedication

The longest sustained appearance of the platter in scripture is the twelve-day catalog of tribal princes' oblations at the dedication of the altar in Numbers 7. On each of twelve consecutive days a single prince of Israel brings the same silver-and-gold inventory, with the silver platter named first in every entry. The opening day belongs to Nahshon: "and his oblation was one silver platter, the weight of which was a hundred and thirty [shekels], one silver bowl of seventy shekels, after the shekel of the sanctuary; both of them full of fine flour mingled with oil for a meal-offering" (Nu 7:13).

The formula then repeats verbatim across the cycle. Nethanel on day two: "he offered for his oblation one silver platter, the weight of which was a hundred and thirty [shekels], one silver bowl of seventy shekels" (Nu 7:19). Eliab on day three (Nu 7:25), Elizur on day four (Nu 7:31), Shelumiel on day five (Nu 7:37), Eliasaph on day six (Nu 7:43), Elishama on day seven (Nu 7:49), Gamaliel on day eight (Nu 7:55), Abidan on day nine (Nu 7:61), Ahiezer on day ten (Nu 7:67), Pagiel on day eleven (Nu 7:73), and Ahira on day twelve (Nu 7:79) — each is recorded with the identical "one silver platter, the weight of which was a hundred and thirty [shekels], one silver bowl of seventy shekels, after the shekel of the sanctuary; both of them full of fine flour mingled with oil for a meal-offering."

The repetition is itself the point. Each prince repeats the same weights against the same standard, so that the platter is fixed as the sanctuary-shekel weight-unit's first and largest carrier. The summary at the close of the chapter assembles the platters into a single counted set: "This was the dedication of the altar, in the day when it was anointed, by the princes of Israel: twelve silver platters, twelve silver bowls, twelve golden spoons" (Nu 7:84). The closing weight-line reduces the twelve platters to a single tally — "each silver platter [weighing] a hundred and thirty [shekels], and each bowl seventy; all the silver of the vessels two thousand and four hundred [shekels], after the shekel of the sanctuary" (Nu 7:85). The platter is thus the principal silver vessel of the dedication, the meal-offering's bearer, and a unit measured by sanctuary-shekel.

The Tabernacle's Vessel-Set

The platter does not stand alone; it is one item in a small family of sanctuary vessels that scripture lists together. The instructions for the table of presence pair dishes with bowls and spoons in a single command: "And you will make its dishes, and its spoons, and its flagons, and its bowls, with which to pour out: of pure gold you will make them" (Ex 25:29). When that table is later set up, the dishes ride on it under a blue cloth: "And on the table of showbread they will spread a cloth of blue, and put on it the dishes, and the spoons, and the bowls and the cups with which to pour out; and the continual bread will be on it" (Nu 4:7).

The dedication-summary's third line names the gold counterpart to the silver platters. Where the platter-and-bowl pair is silver and carries fine flour and oil, the spoons are gold and carry incense: "the twelve golden spoons, full of incense, [weighing] ten [shekels] apiece, after the shekel of the sanctuary; all the gold of the spoons a hundred and twenty [shekels]" (Nu 7:86). The same kit recurs in Solomon's temple: "and the cups, and the snuffers, and the basins, and the spoons, and the firepans, of pure gold; and the hinges, both for the doors of the inner house, the most holy place, and for the doors of the house, [to wit,] of the temple, of gold" (1Ki 7:50). The platter is, in this network, the meal-offering vessel of the silver pair, the gold spoons being the incense-carriers and the bowls the lesser-weight companions.

The Returning Temple-Inventory

A second concentrated occurrence stands at the head of the post-exilic restoration. When Sheshbazzar receives the temple's vessels back from Cyrus, the count opens with a paired platter-line: "And this is the number of them: thirty platters of gold, a thousand platters of silver, nine and twenty altered" (Ezr 1:9). The platters here are no longer dedication-gifts but a returned inventory — the very class of vessels Numbers had counted twelve of now totaling thirty in gold and a thousand in silver, the metals reversed from the Numbers ratio so that gold platters are now the rarer line. The ordering preserves the classical priority of the platter as the leading vessel-class of the sanctuary tally.

A Dish at the Table — Courteous Reaching

The vessel also appears in ordinary domestic life, where a dish at a shared meal becomes the object lesson of a courtesy proverb. In Sirach's manners-table for the well-mannered guest, the rule is to wait on the host's eye and not to reach across him into the common bowl: "Do not stretch out your hand at that which he looks at, And do not reach your hand with his into the dish" (Sir 31:15). The dish here is the same kind of broad, shared serving-vessel — the table-platter — and the proverb assumes guests reaching into one common vessel together.

The Cleansed Outside

In the New Testament the platter is taken up not as a sanctuary vessel but as a parable for hypocritical religion. At a Pharisee's table, the Lord says: "Now you⁺ the Pharisees cleanse the outside of the cup and of the platter; but your⁺ inward part is full of extortion and wickedness" (Lu 11:39). The outside-cleansed platter is then turned on its owners directly: "You⁺ foolish ones, did not he who made the outside make the inside also?" (Lu 11:40).

The image works because of what a platter physically is. It is a flat dish whose contents sit on its open face — there is, in fact, no "inside" of a platter the way there is an inside of a closed cup, which is why the diagnosis lands so heavily on Pharisaic identity rather than on the tableware. Two named vices fill the inward part: extortion and wickedness. The same scene names extortion as the rapacity that fills the cleansed-outside vessel, and the same scene addresses the table-keepers as foolish. The platter's polished face becomes the model of an interior the Maker says he also fashioned and to which he has not been given access.

What the Charger Carries

Across these settings the platter is a remarkably stable object — flat, metal, weighable, paired with a smaller bowl, and bearing something in every appearance. It bears fine flour mingled with oil at the altar-dedication. It bears the showbread on the gold-overlaid table. It bears the temple-treasure home from Babylon by the thousand. It is reached into for shared food at a guest-table. It is held up, the outside cleansed, while its content goes unaddressed at a Pharisee's meal. The charger is, in scripture's vocabulary, the open dish on which the worshiper, the king, the host, and the hypocrite each set what they have to bring.