But you the L-rd took and brought forth out of the iron furnace, out of Egypt, to be to Him a people of inheritance, as you are this day. (Deuteronomy 4:20)
These words were spoken by Moses to the tribes of Israel as they stood on the verge of entering the Promised Land.
The iron furnace: A powerful metaphor!
The ordeal our ancestors suffered as slaves to Pharaoh foreshadowed the captivities, chains, and fires of all of our future oppressions. Three thousand years later it still resonates most fearfully. The iron of tyranny. The furnace– crematoria–in which six million of our grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles became smoke and ash.
Metaphors enrich the Torah’s message. However, the Torah always speaks in a language that can be understood by human beings. “Furnace” and “iron” are not abstractions. The phrase “Iron Furnace” must therefore refer to something that the Jews knew from experience or from well-established tradition.
“Iron furnace” is a translation of the Hebrew koor habarzel. Translations can be ambiguous. This is especially true when translating between languages as different, grammatically, as Hebrew and English. The question addressed here might not arise at all to a native Hebrew speaker. However, those of us whose native language is English, can well wonder what exactly the phrase means.
Barzel is simple. It means “iron.” Koor is more ambiguous. Some English texts translate it as “furnace,” others as “crucible.” If we’re to find a realistic meaning to the phrase, we might start by understanding the difference between these two translations.
Furnace or Crucible?
Smelting in ancient Egypt. Workers tread on bellows to make the fire hot; a crucible is shown at top of the exploded view. Canstock photo
Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman (RaMbaN) takes the phrase as a whole, without addressing a specific meaning of koor: “…that you were in Egypt in a koor of fire and wood.”[1] If anything, his statements could be taken as support for koor as furnace, since furnaces contain wood and fire, whereas crucibles do not. On the other hand, the great medieval commentator Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac (Rashi) comes down squarely on the side of crucible. He explains koor as a vessel (kli)—a kind of pot—in which gold is refined.[2] Impure gold or ores are placed in the pot, and the pot and contents are put into a furnace. The gold melts, the impurities rise to the top and float there. The purified liquid gold can be poured out from under the residue into molds. Note that Rashi’s statement also implies that the Jewish soul is like gold: intrinsically precious, purified through suffering. This interpretation may well have shored up the spirits of Jews throughout a millennium of persecution.
Iron–Where? What?
But if koor means crucible, there is still another ambiguity for English speakers. Does koor habarzel mean a crucible made of iron? Or does it mean a crucible for iron. That is, a crucible in which iron can be purified through heating?
At the time of the exodus from Egypt, artifacts made of iron were quite rare. Iron was a luxury metal used for jewelry and ceremonial objects. A set of three thousand year old iron daggers were described in a hieroglyph of that period as “daggers from heaven.”[3] Why heaven? Because the only iron readily available in most lands at that time was from meteors that had survived the flight through earth’s atmosphere. Nickel content is the chemical signature of meteoric iron. Modern chemical analyses of the “daggers from heaven” reveals them to be made of an alloy of iron and nickel.
The technology for melting various metals—copper, tin, lead, gold and silver—from their ores (smelting) has been known for thousands of years. Iron ore is plentiful in the earth. Iron could, in theory, have been widely available. However, to smelt iron requires a furnace much hotter than an open flame. At the likely time of the Exodus, iron-smelting furnaces were not available in Egypt.
However, such super-furnaces were used by one group of people about three thousand years ago. Archaeologists find the ruins of such furnaces among a people called the “Hittites” who lived in what is now Turkey. Iron implements among their ruins lack nickel, the chemical signature of meteoric iron. Thus it’s clear that the Hittites were smelting iron long before other peoples.
The Hittites’ vast, powerful empire reached deep into Mesopotamia. When the Hittite capitol Hattusa was destroyed in early 1300 BCE the Hittites set up a regional capitol in Carcamesh, in what is now northern Syria.[4] The local people, from Syria to the Mediterranean, were strongly influenced by Hittite culture. In fact many called themselves, and were called by others, “Hittites.” Ephron the Hittite,[5] from whom the Patriarch Abraham bought the cave of Machpelah as a burial place, may have been such a “neo”-Hittite. At any rate Abraham’s descendants must have seen furnaces for smelting iron during their contact with the inheritors of the original Hittite empire. Could they have shaped a crucible out of iron? Certainly. Would they have had enough iron available to make from it mundane tools such as a crucible? Probably.
But could such a crucible be used to melt gold? Could it take the heat?
Precious metals, gold and silver, both melt at around 1000oC. To melt iron requires temperatures considerably higher than that, around 1500oC. However, iron softens long before reaching its melting temperature. This has the advantage that a blacksmith can pull a piece of iron out of an open hearth and hammer it into shape. It has the disadvantage that a vessel made of iron would stretch and sag, making a controlled pour of molten gold into a mold impossible.
We can conclude, therefore, that the Biblical iron crucible was not made of iron. Rather, it was used for smelting iron. Ancient crucibles were made of ceramic or stone, and metal-working furnaces were made of ceramic brick. Brick and stone are refractory materials, used even today for structures that must withstand extremes of heat.
The Iron Melting Pot
Torah is eternally relevant, so let’s bring Rashi’s explanation of the koor habarzel into the twenty-first century. Rashi defined the koor as a vessel for refining gold. Consider what happens in the crucible: Placed in the furnace, the gold melts. Therefore a crucible can also be described as a melting pot. That’s how the Gutnick edition of The Five Books of Moses, based on teachings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, translates Deuteronomy 4:20: G-d took you and brought you out of the iron melting pot, from Egypt…[6] A melting pot is a vessel in which varied substances thrown together mingle and melt. They lose their form and identity. By shifting the metaphor sidewise, the Lubavitcher Rebbe has warned: Don’t assume the koor habarzel is gone. Its genocidal flames appear today as “friendly” forces of “humanism” that drive assimilation and intermarriage. But true humanism means celebrating our human variety, welcoming the challenge of distinctness. The Lubavitcher Rebbe devoted his life to lifting Jews out of this melting pot, this iron crucible, so that the “gold,” the essence of every Jewish soul, will shine forth.
[1] Ramban on Chumash Devarim 4:20. Artscroll edition p. 101. (Note that the English is translated there are “crucible.”
[2] Rashi on Devarim 4:20.
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/metallurgy, retrieved 7/16/2018
[4] White, Ellen, Who Were the Hittites?” Biblical Archeology Review. June 21, 2018. Viewed online at www.biblicalarcheology.org/daily/ancient-cultures/ancient-near-eastern-world/who-were-the-hittites/ retrieved July 16, 2018.
[5] Genesis 23:10.
[6] Chumash—The Book of Deuteronomy, with commentary from Classic Rabbinic Texts and the Lubavitcher Rebbe, compiled and adapted by Rabbi Chaim Miller, Brooklyn, N.Y. Kol Menachem publishers, 2004, p.35.