Brass

Brass is the metal that older English Bibles name where the underlying Hebrew and Greek words mean copper or bronze, and Scripture uses it chiefly as an image of hard, unyielding strength — for gates, walls, shackles, and idols.

The linguistic point comes first, because it shapes everything else. The Hebrew word nechosheth and the Greek words chalkos and chalkolibanon cover copper and its alloys, and the King James and similar older versions regularly render them "brass," while modern versions usually say "bronze" or "copper." Actual brass, an alloy of copper and zinc, is not what the biblical writers had in view. What the text does say is that metal was mined in the land itself: "a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you may dig copper" (Deuteronomy 8:9). It was worked by craftsmen, which is the trade behind "Alexander the coppersmith" (2 Timothy 4:14).

Scripture's most consistent figurative use is strength and security. The blessing of Asher is "your bars will be iron and bronze" (Deuteronomy 33:25); the LORD promises to "break the doors of bronze in pieces and cut apart the bars of iron" (Isaiah 45:2), picturing impregnable gates shattered; and Jeremiah is made "an iron pillar, and bronze walls" against the whole land (Jeremiah 1:18). The same hardness can be a defect: Israel is told "your neck is an iron sinew, and your brow bronze" (Isaiah 48:4), an image of obstinacy. Bronze also appears as shackles — the fetters in which Zedekiah was taken to Babylon (2 Kings 25:7) are bronze in the Hebrew — and as the material of idols, listed among "the gods of gold, and of silver, of bronze, of iron, of wood, and of stone" (Daniel 5:4), idols "which can't see, hear, or walk" (Revelation 9:20).

In visionary passages the metal becomes luminous rather than merely hard: the man in Daniel's vision has arms and feet "like burnished bronze" (Daniel 10:6), and the risen Christ's feet are "like burnished brass, as if it had been refined in a furnace" (Revelation 1:15). The Greek word there, chalkolibanon, names an alloy whose exact composition is genuinely uncertain. In a different register, Paul says that loveless speech has made him "sounding brass or a clanging cymbal" (1 Corinthians 13:1) — a reverberating metal instrument, all noise and no substance.

Readers differ over how to take the burnished bronze of Revelation 1:15 and Daniel 10:6. Many patristic and later interpreters read it allegorically, taking the furnace-refined metal as a sign of tested endurance or of judgment; others treat it simply as stock apocalyptic imagery for radiant, otherworldly glory, and are cautious about assigning fixed meanings to a single metal. Traditions also divide on metal in worship more broadly: some have embraced bronze and precious materials in sacred art, while others, pointing to passages like Daniel 5:4 and Revelation 9:20, stress that metal images are lifeless and read such texts as a caution rather than a warrant.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.