Others are the knife and chopping block; I am the fish and meat.
Tips
history
A 俎 was a four-legged bronze or wooden stand used in ancient Chinese ritual meals and ancestral sacrifices, on which sacrificial meat was displayed. The famous line 人为刀俎，我为鱼肉 ('Others are the knife and chopping board; I am the fish and meat') comes from the Hongmen Banquet (鸿门宴) episode in 《史记·项羽本纪》, when Liu Bang's strategist Fan Kuai realized they were powerless guests. The phrase still describes being utterly at someone's mercy.
Components
semantic
仌bīng
two stacked figures; here, slabs of meat
Left side shows two pieces stacked — slabs of sacrificial meat piled on the altar in the oracle-bone form. The graph 仌 is rarely seen alone, but inside 俎 it preserves the picture of offerings ready for the rite. Indexed under Kangxi #9 人 (rén) by tradition, taken from the doubled-person silhouette of 仌.
Right side 且 is itself an ancient pictograph of an ancestral altar or stacked offering-stand. Together with the meat-slabs on the left, the whole character pictures a ritual chopping board loaded for sacrifice — hence both 'altar' and 'chopping board' as later meanings.
Filed under radical 人 (rén, #9) by convention. 人 is not a separate component in 俎, so no strokes are highlighted.
