Oven

The oven (tannur in Hebrew) in ancient Israel was a cylindrical clay vessel about three feet tall and two feet in diameter, wider at the bottom than the top, heated by burning wood or dried dung inside its cavity. Flat bread was baked by sticking it to the inner sides of the heated vessel or on a griddle placed over the opening. The intense heat of a furnace or oven became a natural metaphor for intense suffering or testing: I have tried you in the furnace of affliction (Isaiah 48:10).

Hosea 7:4–7 uses the metaphor of a heated oven for the burning passion of adulterers and the conspiracies of princes against the kings of Israel. Malachi 4:1 warns of the Day of the LORD coming like an oven in which the arrogant and evildoers will be consumed as stubble. The communal baking oven in Leviticus 26:26 — ten women baking in one oven — symbolizes extreme scarcity and the breakdown of social life under judgment.