Plane

The plane appears in scripture as a carpenter's shaping tool, named once in Isaiah's portrait of the idol-maker at work. It is one item in the kit — line, pencil, planes, compasses — used to bring a block of wood down to the figure of a man.

The Carpenter's Tool

Isaiah's polemic against image-making walks step by step through the craftsman's procedure. After the wood is selected and prepared, the carpenter measures, draws, shapes, and finishes the block: "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). Planes are the shaping instruments in the middle of the sequence — the tool that takes the rough timber and brings it to a smooth human form. The point of the catalogue is that the very tools by which the idol is made expose what it is: a piece of furniture, manufactured to dwell in a house, the product of ordinary woodworking equipment.