Someone with a sense of humor, back near the beginning of the nineteenth century, must have remembered his Bible when he first beheld a huge brandy bottle.
He was reminded of the verse which says, “And the man Jeroboam was a mighty man of valor” (I Kings 12:28), and the one, also about Jeroboam, “who did sin, and who made Israel to sin” (I Kings 14:16).
This unknown wit thereupon christened this large bottle, Jeroboam, a name by which it is still known. It may have been the same man who gave the same name to an unusually capacious bowl or goblet at about the same time.
Through confusion with a later biblical king, the latter vessel is also called a jorum or joram.
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