Pitcher

The pitcher in the UPDV is an earthen water-vessel — fragile, ordinary, carried on the shoulder by household women, broken at the cistern, or smashed by soldiers in the dark. It appears at wells, on city errands, in laments over Zion, and in the strangest battle in Judges.

Carrying Water

A pitcher belongs first to the well. Abraham's slave fixes his sign on it: "the damsel to whom I will say, Let down your pitcher, I pray you, that I may drink. And she will say, Drink, and I will give your camels to drink also" (Gen 24:14). The kindness he prays for is enacted through the lowering and lifting of one of these vessels.

The Gospel preserves the same domestic picture, now read as a meeting-sign in Jerusalem: "there will meet you⁺ a man bearing a pitcher of water: follow him" (Mark 14:13). The man with the pitcher is enough to identify the house where the Passover meal will be kept.

Earthen and Breakable

Lamentations turns the pitcher into a figure for the people themselves: "The precious sons of Zion, comparable to fine gold, How are they esteemed as earthen pitchers, the work of the hands of the potter!" (Lam 4:2). Sons once weighed against gold are now reckoned at the value of common pottery — the simile is the whole indictment.

The same fragility carries Ecclesiastes' image of dying: "before the silver cord is loosed, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher is broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern" (Eccl 12:6). The pitcher snaps at the fountain in a list of breakages that name the end of life.

Gideon's Three Hundred

The most extended use of the pitcher is in Gideon's night-attack. The vessels are issued as cover, not weapon: "he put into the hands of all of them trumpets, and empty pitchers, with torches inside the pitchers" (Jud 7:16). The torches burn hidden inside the clay until the moment of the assault: "they blew the trumpets, and broke in pieces the pitchers that were in their hands" (Jud 7:19), and then "the three companies blew the trumpets, and broke the pitchers, and held the torches in their left hands ... and they cried, A sword of Yahweh and of Gideon" (Jud 7:20). The fight is decided by three hundred men breaking pottery in the dark.