Compasses

The compasses appear once in scripture, named among the carpenter's tools in Isaiah's satire of idol-making.

A Carpenter's Tool

In Isaiah's mockery of the craftsman who shapes a god out of a block of wood, the compasses sit in a sequence of measuring and shaping instruments: "The carpenter stretches out a line; he marks it out with a pencil; he shapes it with planes, and he marks it out with the compasses, and shapes it after the figure of a man, according to the beauty of man, to dwell in a house" (Isa 44:13). The tool's purpose in the verse is the careful tracing of human form onto wood — the very precision of the workmanship sharpening the prophet's irony that the finished image is then worshiped as a god.