Dreaming About Eating: The Bible Gives It No Meaning

Scripture records no dream about eating, and gives no meaning to one. But eating itself is close to the centre of the Bible — closer than most of us notice — and where it appears, it is almost never about food.

Does the Bible interpret dreams about eating?

It does not. Scripture records many dreams and interprets a handful, each meaning given directly by God through a named servant, for one person, about one matter. No verse assigns a sense to eating in sleep.

Pharaoh’s cattle do eat, in the famous dream — seven gaunt cows devouring seven sleek ones — but Joseph does not derive that from what eating generally means. He says the interpretation belongs to God, and God gives it once, about one nation’s harvest.

What eating means in the Bible

Belonging. Almost every significant meal in Scripture is a statement about who is at the table.

The complaint against Jesus was not that he taught strange things. It was that he ate with the wrong people — tax collectors, sinners, a man up a tree. In that world sharing a table meant accepting somebody, and he kept accepting the wrong ones, deliberately, in public.

The father in the parable does not lecture the returning son. He kills the calf and throws a party, and the elder brother’s real objection is that he will not come in and eat.

And the risen Christ, in a locked room full of people wondering whether they are seeing a ghost, asks whether there is anything to eat. A spirit does not want breakfast. He does.

The invitation at the door

There is one verse worth carrying out of this.

Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.

Not I will come in and inspect. Not I will come in and correct. He proposes a meal.

And he is knocking from outside. Whatever we imagine about how God arrives, this picture has him waiting on a doorstep for somebody to hear him and decide.

If the dream was about hunger

Let us be practical, because dreams about eating often come to people who are not eating well.

Scripture takes bodies seriously. Elijah, wanting to die, was given food and sleep before he was given a word from God. Jesus, having raised a girl from the dead, told her family to get her something to eat. Our faith has never treated the body as an inconvenience attached to a soul.

If we are eating badly, or too much, or alone, or not at all, that is not a spiritual failure to be confessed. It is a fact about a creature God made, and he has shown some interest in feeding people.

What to do with the morning

Let us not interpret the dream.

Let us instead eat something, with somebody, if we possibly can. That sounds too simple to be a spiritual instruction, which is exactly why it is worth saying: the Church’s central act is a meal, and loneliness at the table is one of the things Scripture keeps setting out to fix.

And if there is nobody today, the door is still being knocked on, and the one knocking has said what he intends to do when it opens.

A blessing for the morning

May we be fed, in the body and otherwise.

May we set a place for whoever is the wrong sort of person to invite.

And may we hear the knocking over the noise of the house.

Frequently asked

Is eating used symbolically in the Bible?

Yes, and memorably. Ezekiel eats a scroll that tastes sweet as honey (3:3); in Revelation 10:9-10 the same scroll turns sour in the stomach; and Peter is told in a vision, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat” (Acts 10:13).

Do those passages interpret my dream?

No. Each comes with its own explanation inside the text. Scripture supplies no key for dreams it has not recorded (Genesis 40:8).

What is the closest thing to guidance here?

Ask for wisdom rather than for a meaning (James 1:5), and notice what the dream disturbed — usually something already true in waking life.

Related reading

• Dreaming of Eating Bread: The Bible Gives It No Meaning
• No One in the Bible Dreams About Eggs — but Jesus Talks About One
• Dreaming About Candy: The Bible Gives It No Meaning