IRON — the metal Tubal-cain forges tools of at Genesis 4:22 (already on these pages), and the one thing that may not touch the altar: you shall not swing iron over them, Deuteronomy 27:5. Exodus 20:25 had said your tool; Deuteronomy names the metal, and Joshua 8:31 and 1 Kings 6:7 (neither yet on these pages) both keep it — an altar over which no one had swung iron, a temple in which no tool of iron was heard. ⭐ The word stands in eight verses of this book, and they run from furniture to a furnace to a sky: Og’s bed of iron (3:11), Egypt as the iron furnace (4:20), a land whose stones are iron (8:9), the axe-head that slips from its handle, the iron (19:5, all already on these pages), this altar, and then in the curses a sky of bronze over earth that is iron and a yoke of iron on the neck (28:23, 28:48), before Asher’s bars of iron and bronze at 33:25 (none of the last three yet on these pages). ⚠ 1 Samuel 13:19 (not yet on these pages) reports that in Saul’s day no smith was found in all the land of Israel, the Philistines having seen to it; the metal the altar refuses is the metal Israel could not yet work. → first discussed at Deut 27:5