Bread, Meat, or a Meal? Hebrew and Arabic as Cousins

One of the things I enjoy about learning Arabic is how often I come across a word I already know. Or think I know. Sometimes the Hebrew helps. Sometimes it helps me say the wrong thing with considerably more confidence than I otherwise would have had.

But occasionally, the Arabic makes me stop and reconsider the Hebrew.

The example that has been bothering me lately is לחם. In Hebrew, lechem means bread. In Arabic, لحم (laḥm) means meat. The words are related, but how did they end up meaning such different things?

My first thought was that the original word might have meant food, or a meal, and that each language eventually settled on a particular kind of food. That seems reasonable enough. Then I started looking at the pesukim, and found myself in the middle of a disagreement between Ibn Ezra and the Ramban.

As often happens, what I thought would be a small language-learning observation became a rather longer investigation.

I made a video about some of these connections. This post gives me room to follow the bread question a little further. There is also a shorter Arabic version on The Daily Derja.

Play

Words I Already Know. More or Less.

Hebrew and Arabic are both Semitic languages. If you know Hebrew, a fair amount of basic Arabic vocabulary is immediately recognizable:

The Arabic pronunciations here are Levantine, the sort I am learning and actually hear in conversation.

Some of the differences are fairly predictable once you know what to listen for. Arabic سلام (salām) corresponds to Hebrew שלום (shalom). The long ā in an ancestral form became ō in the Canaanite languages, including Hebrew. This is called the Canaanite shift.¹

There are consonant correspondences too. Arabic س often corresponds to Hebrew שׁ, as in salām and shalom. Arabic ش can correspond to Hebrew שׂ, as in عشرة and עשר, “ten.” The Hebrew שׂ was historically a separate sound, although we now pronounce it like ס.²

Another familiar pair is Arabic راس (rās) and Hebrew ראש (rosh), “head.” That one has a more complicated history involving the א as well as the vowel change.³

These patterns are useful, but they are historical sound correspondences, not a license to swap letters whenever convenient. I would very much like a simple rule that turns Hebrew into Arabic. Unfortunately, Arabic continues to insist that I learn it.

A Foot, a Foot Soldier, and a Man

The last pair in the table has a particularly interesting possible connection.

Arabic رِجل (rijl) means a foot or leg, just like Hebrew רגל. But Arabic also has رَجُل (rajul), meaning a man. Same three consonants, different vowels.

Hebrew does have a word for a person built from רגל: רגלי, someone on foot, or an infantryman.

Ahmad Al-Jallad suggests a connection along these lines in An Outline of the Grammar of the Safaitic Inscriptions. Under RGL, he reads the Safaitic word as “foot soldier” and proposes this as an earlier sense behind Arabic rajul.⁴

Safaitic is an ancient North Arabian script found in inscriptions left by nomads in the basalt desert of southern Syria, northeastern Jordan, and northern Saudi Arabia. The military contexts help explain why Al-Jallad reads the word that way.

So the proposed development is from a person fighting on foot to a man more generally. Hebrew רגלי makes that easy to understand. It does not establish the history of the Arabic word, but it gives a Hebrew speaker something familiar to compare it with.

I like this explanation. It is also an explanation I am borrowing from a scholar, rather than something I can establish by noticing that the letters match.

So Why Does Bread Mean Meat?

Back to לחם.

Hebrew לחם and Arabic لحم are recognized relatives.⁵ The question is what happened to their meanings.

The idea that they developed from a broader word for food appeals to me. I wondered whether Hebrew had narrowed the meaning relatively late, perhaps by the time of the Mishnah. But before trying to date that change, I need to establish what would count as evidence that it happened at all.

What we do find in Tanach are uses that seem broader than bread. The difficulty is deciding what to make of them.

Belshazzar Made a Very Large Lunch

Daniel 5 begins:

בֵּלְשַׁאצַּר מַלְכָּא עֲבַד לְחֶם רַב לְרַבְרְבָנוֹהִי אֲלַף

King Belshazzar made a great lechem for a thousand of his nobles.⁶

Rashi explains:

עבד לחם רב — עשה סעודה גדולה

He made a great feast.⁷

This part of Daniel is Aramaic, so we have brought a third language into the discussion. But the familiar word is there, and Rashi understands the phrase as a סעודה גדולה.

Does that mean לחם itself means a meal? Or is bread standing for the meal as a whole? We do something similar in English when we talk about “breaking bread” with someone.

That may sound like a rather fussy distinction. It turns out to be the distinction that matters.

The Bread on the Mizbeach

In Vayikra, the kohen is described as offering לחם:

וְקִדַּשְׁתּוֹ כִּי אֶת לֶחֶם אֱלֹהֶיךָ הוּא מַקְרִיב

You shall treat him as holy, for he offers the lechem of your God.⁸

More specifically, in the description of the korban shelamim, the fat and kidneys burned on the mizbeach are called לֶחֶם אִשֶּׁה, the lechem of the fire offering.⁹

There is no loaf of bread in that description. There are parts of an animal. To someone learning Arabic, calling them לחם suddenly seems considerably less strange.

But we still have the same question. Is לחם a general word for food, which can include animal offerings? Or does it mean bread, with the offerings described figuratively as Hashem’s bread?

Ibn Ezra and the Ramban

In Shemos 16:4, Hashem tells Moshe:

הִנְנִי מַמְטִיר לָכֶם לֶחֶם מִן הַשָּׁמָיִם

I am going to rain down lechem for you from heaven.

The subject is the מן. Why call it לחם?

Ibn Ezra writes:

ומלת לחם — מאכל. תמצא על הלחם כמשמעו, גם על הבשר, כמו לחם אשה, גם על פרי, כמו נשחיתה עץ בלחמו

The word lechem means food. You find it used for bread in its usual sense, and also for meat, as in lechem isheh, and also for fruit, as in “let us destroy the tree with its lechem.”¹⁰

Well, there it is. Ibn Ezra explicitly includes בשר among the meanings of לחם.

That does not solve the historical question, but it is rather satisfying to find the exact difficulty I was thinking about addressed so directly in a familiar commentary.

The Ramban brings the view that לחם means food, along with the proof from the korbanos and the phrase כי תשב ללחום את מושל, “when you sit down to eat with a ruler.” Chavel identifies the commentators behind this view as Ibn Ezra and Radak.¹¹

The Ramban then gives his own explanation:

לחם, בעבור שיעשו ממנו לחם… כי כל פת יקרא לחם, לא בהיותו מן החטה או מן השעורים בלבד

It is called lechem because they would make bread from it … for any loaf is called lechem, not only one made from wheat or barley.

The Torah says elsewhere that they made the מן into cakes. For the Ramban, that explains why it is called bread. It does not have to grow as wheat to become a loaf.

And the korbanos?

והנכון כי “ללחום” לאכול לחם, ו"לחם אלהיך" כנוי, שהוא סעודה לאלהיך כלחם לאדם

The correct view is that lilchom means to eat bread, and “the lechem of your God” is a figure of speech: a meal for your God, as bread is for a person.

The Ramban also brings לא על הלחם לבדו יחיה האדם, “a person does not live by bread alone.” Bread is central to human sustenance, and that helps explain its use in describing the offerings.

So Ibn Ezra understands לחם as a word with a broad range of meanings: bread, meat, even fruit. The Ramban explains these uses through bread and its place in a meal.

Both can account for the pesukim. But they leave me with different ways of thinking about the Arabic.

If the Hebrew word itself includes food more generally, it is easier to imagine Hebrew and Arabic preserving different parts of an older, broader meaning. If these are figurative uses of “bread,” I cannot use them in quite the same way. Either reading still leaves the historical question open.

Bread Called Food, or Food Called Bread?

The obvious objection is לחם הפנים. That was clearly bread. Vayikra describes flour baked into twelve challos, arranged on the shulchan, and calls it לחם. The שתי הלחם are just as explicit: flour, leaven, and baking.¹²

So we certainly have actual bread being called לחם in Tanach.

But does that establish that לחם had acquired a specifically bread meaning? If the word meant “food,” bread would still qualify. Calling a loaf “food” does not tell us whether the word “food” has come to mean a loaf.

The repeated association with loaves and baking gives good reason to recognize a bread sense. Still, there are several different questions here: what the object was, what the word meant in that context, and how its range of meanings developed historically. The first is clear in these passages. It does not settle the other two on its own.

That is why I am reluctant to say that the existence of לחם הפנים disproves an earlier, broader meaning. It establishes that bread was called לחם. It does not establish when that usage developed, whether bread was the word’s primary meaning, or whether the uses for other foods were necessarily figurative.

What About the Mishnah?

My original question included the possibility that לחם became more specific in Mishnaic Hebrew. I still think the change in usage is worth looking into, but I do not have enough to say that this is what happened.

One small thing caught my attention. In the first Mishnah of the sixth perek of Berachos, the word used for bread is פת:

חוץ מן הפת, שעל הפת הוא אומר המוציא לחם מן הארץ

Except for bread, over which one says: “Who brings forth bread from the earth.”¹³

The Mishnah uses פת in its own sentence and לחם in the bracha, whose wording echoes Tehillim. But assigning this bracha to bread does not by itself prove that לחם excludes other foods. A general word for food could also appear in a blessing said over bread.

Menachos gives us the more concrete examples again: the שתי הלחם are kneaded and baked individually, and their dimensions are specified.¹⁴ These are unmistakably loaves. But this is inherited Temple terminology, so it does not settle the range of the word in everyday Mishnaic speech either.

I would like to know whether the use of פת alongside לחם reflects a broader difference in usage. These examples give me something to investigate, rather than a date at which I can confidently say the meaning narrowed.

To answer the original question properly, I would need to look beyond Hebrew and Arabic, compare the related words in other Semitic languages, and look more systematically at how לחם is used over time. “Food,” “meal,” “bread,” and “meat” are related ideas, but they are not interchangeable evidence.

For now, I have a plausible suggestion and some interesting pesukim. I would be happy to hear from someone who knows the history better.

And Then There Are the Words That Just Confuse Me

Shared vocabulary has its less helpful side too:

These are “false friends”: familiar-looking words that encourage the wrong interpretation. That describes the learner’s problem; it does not tell us whether the words are historically related.¹⁵

מכתב and مكتب clearly belong to the same family, from the root meaning “write.” One is a written thing; the other is a place associated with writing.

מדינה and مدينة are related too. Biblical Hebrew uses מדינה for a province, and the lexicon compares it with Aramaic and Arabic forms meaning a city.¹⁶ The modern Hebrew meaning can make the Arabic seem more surprising than it really is.

ספר and سفر need a little more care. Arabic also has سِفر (sifr), a book or volume, although it is hardly the everyday word I would reach for when asking someone what they are reading.

And סבר and صبر are particularly tempting for a Hebrew speaker. Hebrew gives us סבר, הסבר, מסביר: thinking, explanation, explaining. Arabic صبر means patience. But the similar sound is misleading; we should not treat them as the same root.

I suppose patience is useful when waiting for an explanation. That will have to do as a mnemonic.

Back to the Pesukim

I started learning Arabic because I wanted to understand and speak another language. I expected Hebrew to help me with that. I had not really expected the process to work in the other direction.

לחם אלהיך is a phrase I could easily read without stopping. Learning that لحم means meat made me stop. Then Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and the Ramban gave me quite a bit to think about.

I still do not know whether the ancestral word meant food, or exactly how bread and meat came to share a name. But I understand the question better, and I have a reason to go back to those comments and read them again.

That seems like a worthwhile result from learning one Arabic word.