It’s easy to imagine how the technology of pottery might have begun in the distant past. Once fire was used routinely, it would be natural to build fires in the open, maybe dig out a depression in the dirt to hold the wood. Then it wouldn’t take long in the scheme of things to notice that after a rain, some of these depressions drained relatively quickly, while a depression dug into clay became hardened after a fire and would hold the rainwater for a long time. It’s a small step from there to fashioning bowls out of clay and putting them in a fire so they could be used to collect, hold, or carry water.

Something like this could have happened more than once and in more than one place. Pottery is one of humankind’s oldest technologies, naturally not as old as fire but perhaps before agriculture. But this isn’t about the origin of pottery; this is about the origin of the term “Potter’s Field”.

A Potter’s Field, as the term is used today, is a burial ground for the poor or indigent who could not afford to buy a plot in a private cemetery. People often wonder where the term originated. If you look it up you will quickly find a reference to the New Testament. Specifically, to Matthew 27:7—“And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in” (King James Version). In this passage “they” are priests and the “them” happens to be the thirty pieces of silver, blood money paid to Judas Iscariot, who in Matthew’s version, gives the coins to the temple priests before hanging himself. So in Matthew the term “potter’s field” appears as a place to bury—not the indigent, but rather strangers. This may not be an important distinction because strangers might well be indigent. But curiously, in the next verse we learn “Wherefore that field was called the Field of Blood unto this day.”

So the original “Potter’s Field”, if you wish to believe this is the first, had a completely different name. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that modern versions are not called Fields of Blood because that is rather unappealing compared with Potter’s Field. However, I would suggest there may be a different reason to call such a burial ground a Potter’s Field, perhaps the same reason the priests would buy a (lowercase) potter’s field as a burial ground rather than some other piece of land.

First, though, I should point out that the other Gospels in the New Testament don’t mention a potter’s field at all. They don’t even agree on how Judas Iscariot died. The death of Judas is one of those problematic points in scripture, but my interest here is not to delve into biblical scholarship. Whoever wrote the Gospel of Matthew told about priests who bought a field, once used for digging clay, as a burial ground, which was then called the Field of Blood. The term Potter’s Field may have originated in this story, either at the time or later; it isn’t clear. That, in fact, is my point: it isn’t a cut-and-dried case for the origin of the term “Potter’s Field”. It is, of course, a possibility.

There is another possibility. Perhaps people have used potter’s fields as burial grounds for a long time before the Gospel of Matthew was written. The main feature of burial is that a hole must be dug. It’s not always easy to dig a hole in the ground. Before iron was mined or steel was invented and shovels were manufactured using it, the job of digging was an even more onerous one. The profession of grave-digging was one for strong, younger men who would need to be paid for their labor. Who else had to dig holes for a living? Potters did. People who made things out of clay had to dig up the clay from fields where it was close to the surface. And why would they fill in the holes? They wouldn’t, because there was no reason to do so. They might come back later and want to dig there again.

So the main features of an actual potter’s field are first, the clay is near the surface so the ground is probably not well-suited for agriculture; and second, there are holes dug by the potter where clay was extracted. Holes that are not filled in, just waiting for someone to dump a body there.

Such a place would be quite natural to use, hopefully after the potter has left or sold it, for burial of the poor who could not even afford to pay the grave-digger’s fee. And since that’s the case, it would be strange indeed if during the ten thousand years or so that pottery has been made, that potter’s fields were not used as convenient burial grounds, and likely earlier rather than later in that history. I would suggest (without evidence, of course) that the priests in Matthew were not doing something unprecedented or even unusual by using a potter’s field for a cemetery, but instead something that had probably happened many times in the past.

As for the exact phrase “Potter’s Field,” I don’t know of any evidence that it was used before the Gospel of Matthew in connection with burial. So this might be the technical start of the phrase, even if the concept was not new. As often happens, as with pottery itself, the mists of time obscure the origin of ancient things.