A CRAFTSMAN — one who works a hard material, wood, stone or metal; the word takes the material as a second noun, a craftsman of stone, a craftsman of bronze. It is the trade of Tubal-cain, who forged every tool of bronze and iron (Genesis 4:22), of the engraver who cuts the tribes’ names into the ephod’s stones (Exodus 28:11), and of the men Bezalel is to teach (Exodus 35:35, all already on these pages). ⭐ At Deuteronomy 27:15 the same hands make the idol: the work of a craftsman’s hands, and that phrase stands in two verses of the Hebrew Bible — this one, and Jeremiah 10:3 (not yet on these pages), where the idol is a tree cut from the forest, the work of a craftsman’s hands with the axe. Hosea 8:6 (not yet on these pages) says it in three words of the calf of Samaria: a craftsman made it, and it is no God. ⚠ The chapter that curses the craftsman’s idol forbids the craftsman’s tool on the altar four verses earlier (27:5). The KJV reads ‘the craftsman’, the Douay ‘artificers’, the NWT 1984 ‘a wood-and-metal worker’, the NIV ‘skilled hands’; the RV60 «artífice». → first discussed at Deut 27:15