Molding

Molding is the working of metal — and sometimes clay — by heat, hammer, and form. The word "molten" runs as a thread through the scriptures: from the ore lifted out of the ground, to the great bronze furniture cast for the temple, to the golden calf shaped at Sinai, to the crucible image of judgment in the prophets, and to the engraver who labors over the pattern of his vessel.

The Substance Drawn from the Earth

Job, surveying the inaccessible places where wisdom is not found, names the metallurgical fact that lies behind every cast image: "Iron is taken out of the earth, And copper is molten out of the stone" (Job 28:2). The ore is wrenched from rock and reduced by fire — a precondition for everything else in the topic.

The Smith and the Engraver

The act of molding belongs to a recognizable trade. Sirach pictures it from the inside: "So the blacksmith sitting by the anvil, And considering the unwrought iron; The vapor of the fire cracks his flesh, And in the heat of the furnace he glows; The sound of the hammer is continually in his ear, And his eyes are upon the pattern of the vessel; He sets his heart upon finishing his works, And his diligence is to adorn [them] perfectly" (Sir 38:28). Beside him stand the engraver who "cuts gravings of signets" and sets his heart "to make his likeness true" (Sir 38:27), and the potter who "fashions the clay" with his arm and "applies his heart to finish the glazing" (Sir 38:30). They rely upon their hands; "each is wise in his handiwork" (Sir 38:31), and "the fabric of the world, they will maintain" (Sir 38:34).

The same trade-vocabulary is taken up by Yahweh as a creation claim: "Look, I have created the blacksmith who blows the fire of coals, and brings forth a weapon for his work; and I have created the waster to destroy" (Isa 54:16). The smith is not autonomous; the one who made the smith made the molding.

Casting the Temple Furniture

Solomon's temple is the great positive instance. Hiram fashions "the two pillars of bronze, eighteen cubits high apiece" (1 Kgs 7:15), and "made the molten sea of ten cubits from brim to brim, round in a circle, and its height was five cubits; and a line of thirty cubits encircled it round about" (1 Kgs 7:23). The casting itself is not done in Jerusalem but downriver. Both 1 Kings and 2 Chronicles record the place: "The king had cast them in the plain of the Jordan, in the clay ground between Succoth and Zarethan" (1 Kgs 7:46); "In the plain of the Jordan the king cast them, in the clay ground between Succoth and Zeredah" (2 Chr 4:17). The molding required clay molds, and the alluvial clay between Succoth and Zarethan is what the narrative singles out.

The Molten Calf and the Mosaic Ban

The negative instance is older and bitter. Aaron at Sinai "received it at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, and made it [into] a molten calf: and they said, These are your gods, O Israel, which brought you up out of the land of Egypt" (Exod 32:4). Yahweh's own description to Moses repeats the verb: "they have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them: they have made themselves a molten calf, and have worshiped it, and have sacrificed to it" (Exod 32:8). At Horeb in retrospect Yahweh names the act with the same word: "they have quickly turned aside out of the way which I commanded them; they have made themselves a molten image" (Deut 9:12).

Out of that incident the law issues a flat prohibition: "You will make yourself no molten gods" (Exod 34:17). It is repeated in the holiness code: "Don't turn yourselves to idols, nor make to yourselves molten gods: I am Yahweh your⁺ God" (Lev 19:4). What the smith can shape is, by that act, disqualified from being worshiped.

The Idol-Maker's Workshop

Isaiah develops the prohibition by walking the reader through the workshop. "The image, a workman has cast [it], and the goldsmith overlays it with gold, and casts [for it] silver chains" (Isa 40:19). "So the carpenter encourages the goldsmith, [and] he who smoothes with the hammer him who strikes the anvil, saying of the soldering, It is good; and he fastens it with nails, that it should not be moved" (Isa 41:7). "The blacksmith [makes] an ax, and works in the coals, and fashions it with hammers, and works it with his strong arm: yes, he is hungry, and his strength fails; he drinks no water, and is faint" (Isa 44:12). Beside him the carpenter "shapes it after the figure of a man, according to the beauty of man, to dwell in a house" (Isa 44:13), and burns the offcuts to bake bread, and out of the same wood "makes a god, and worships it; he makes it a graven image, and falls down to it" (Isa 44:15). "Such as lavish gold out of the bag, and weigh silver in the balance, they hire a goldsmith, and he makes it a god; they fall down, yes, they worship" (Isa 46:6). The trade is real; the object made by the trade is not.

The Epistle to Diognetus presses the same point in plainer terms: "Are not all these of corruptible matter? Are they not all made by iron and fire? Did not the sculptor form one, the coppersmith another, the silversmith a third, and the potter a fourth? Before they were fashioned into these forms by the arts of those men, was not each of them transformed, and that even now, by its respective craftsman? Could not the vessels which now are of the same matter, if they met with the same craftsmen, be made like such as these?" (Gr 2:3). The molded thing is not other than the matter the craftsman had under his hand.

The Crucible as Judgment

The molting fire turns into a figure for judgment in Ezekiel. Of the boiling pot of Jerusalem he says: "Then set it empty on its coals, that it may be hot, and its bronze may burn, and that the filthiness of it may be molten in it, that the corrosion of it may be consumed" (Ezek 24:11). The same heat that casts the bronze burns the filth out of it.

The Sky as a Molten Mirror

A last figure stands aside from the workshop and the calf and the crucible. To Job the voice from the whirlwind asks: "Can you with him spread out the sky, Which is strong as a molten mirror?" (Job 37:18). The created firmament is itself imagined as cast metal — burnished, hard, and beyond any human smith's reach. The ground beneath which the ore is hidden (Job 28:2) and the sky overhead are alike compared to the smith's work, and only one craftsman is in view.