Stocks

Stocks are an instrument of restraint that fastens a prisoner's feet so the body cannot move from the spot. The image surfaces in two settings in the UPDV: as Job's metaphor for divine surveillance pressed onto a sufferer's body, and as the literal hardware used inside the temple precinct to silence prophets.

Job's Metaphor of the Bound Foot

Job's complaint reaches for the language of the prison-yard to describe what God has done to him. He pictures himself as a man whose feet have been clamped in place while every step is logged: "You put my feet also in the stocks, And mark all my paths; You set a bound to the soles of my feet" (Job 13:27). The verse pairs the stocks with two other constraints — the marking of every path, and a hard limit set to the soles of the feet — so that the picture is not a single restraint but a closed system in which movement, route, and even the floor under his feet are no longer his own.

Elihu later throws the same image back at Job as a quotation of Job's own complaint: "He puts my feet in the stocks, He marks all my paths" (Job 33:11). The wording tracks Job 13:27 closely enough that Elihu is plainly summarizing what Job has been saying about God; in Elihu's hands the line becomes evidence in the case he is building against Job's posture.

A related restraint-image stands in the Proverbs warning against the strange woman, where the youth who follows her is compared to "[one in] fetters to the correction of the fool" (Pr 7:22). The instrument named here is fetters rather than stocks, but the picture is adjacent: a man whose feet are no longer free, walking under correction he did not choose.

Stocks at the Temple Gate

In Jeremiah the stocks are no longer metaphor but standing equipment. Pashhur, the chief officer in the house of Yahweh, uses them on the prophet himself: "Then Pashhur struck Jeremiah the prophet, and put him in the stocks that were in the upper gate of Benjamin, which was in the house of Yahweh" (Jer 20:2). The location is precise — the upper gate of Benjamin, inside the temple complex — and the assault is paired with the confinement so the reader sees Jeremiah beaten and locked together.

Release comes the following morning, and Jeremiah's first words on being loosed are a renaming oracle directed back at his jailer: "And it came to pass on the next day, that Pashhur brought forth Jeremiah out of the stocks. Then said Jeremiah to him, Yahweh has not called your name Pashhur, but Magor-missabib" (Jer 20:3). The new name, Magor-missabib, is delivered in the same act as the unfastening; the prophet walks out of the stocks pronouncing judgment on the officer who put him in.

The institutional background to that scene appears later, in a letter from Shemaiah to Zephaniah complaining that the temple-officer's stocks have not been used as he thinks they should be: "Yahweh has made you priest in the stead of Jehoiada the priest, that there may be officers in the house of Yahweh, for every man who is insane, and makes himself a prophet, that you should put him in the stocks and in shackles" (Jer 29:26). The verse describes the duty Pashhur had carried out against Jeremiah — putting a self-styled prophet in the stocks and shackles — as a routine expectation laid on the priest in charge of the temple precinct. The temple, in Jeremiah, is a place equipped to silence prophets as well as to hear them.