What Does Bread Symbolize in the Bible? Life, God’s Daily Provision and Christ

Bread in the Bible represents life and God’s provision of it, one day at a time. Moses taught that “man doth not live by bread only”, and Jesus taught, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Bread also points to Christ, who called himself “the bread of life” and, taking bread at the Last Supper, said, “this is my body”.

Israel learned the lesson in the wilderness, gathering manna each morning, enough for that day and never for the next. Jesus taught us to pray the same way. Then he offered bread of another kind, bread that does not run out.

The word “bread” appears 361 times in the King James Version, in 330 verses: 281 times in the Old Testament and 80 times in the New. It enters the story just outside Eden, when God tells Adam, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread” (Genesis 3:19). Other Bibles give other totals, because translators render the same Hebrew and Greek words in different ways.

Bible	Total	Old Testament	New Testament
King James Version	361	281	80
Almeida Revista e Corrigida	338	266	72
Almeida Revista e Atualizada	319	255	64
Almeida Corrigida Fiel	341	268	73
Reina-Valera 1960	329	255	74

If you count in another Bible, expect a different number. These figures are for the singular word in the 66 books these five Bibles contain. A Bible with the deuterocanonical books, as Catholic Bibles have, gives another total; Tobit alone says, “Eat thy bread with the hungry and the needy” (Tobit 4:17, Douay-Rheims). Printings of one version differ slightly too, and the 1969 printing of the Almeida Revista e Corrigida has 339. The Almeida and Reina-Valera Bibles also use the plural, often where the King James has “loaves” or “unleavened bread”: 78 more times in the Almeida Revista e Corrigida, 96 in the Revista e Atualizada, 86 in the Corrigida Fiel and 89 in the Reina-Valera 1960. The King James has “loaf” or “loaves” 35 times.

Translations differ for a deeper reason as well. The usual Hebrew word, lechem, means more than a loaf. Brown-Driver-Briggs defines it as “bread, food”, and the King James sometimes renders it “food”, “victuals” or “meat”, an old English word for food. To “eat bread” often means simply to have a meal, as when Joseph’s brothers “sat down to eat bread” after they had “cast him into a pit” (Genesis 37:24–25).

Because for the people of the Bible it was the food that kept them alive, “the ordinary food of early Hebrews”, as Brown-Driver-Briggs puts it. A psalm thanks God for “bread which strengtheneth man’s heart” (Psalm 104:15). In Leviticus God warns of famine “when I have broken the staff of your bread” (Leviticus 26:26). Bread is the staff a household leans on. When it breaks, people go hungry.

Yet the same Scripture that makes bread the picture of life says it is not the whole of life. Looking back on Israel’s “forty years in the wilderness”, Moses reminded the people that God “fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live” (Deuteronomy 8:3). When Jesus had fasted forty days and the tempter said, “command that these stones be made bread”, he answered with that same verse: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4).

Manna was the food God gave Israel in the wilderness after the escape from Egypt. “Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you,” God told Moses, “and the people shall go out and gather a certain rate every day” (Exodus 16:4). In the morning, when the dew lifted, “there lay a small round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground.” The people did not know what it was, and Moses told them, “This is the bread which the Lord hath given you to eat” (Exodus 16:14–15). It was white, “like coriander seed”, and “the taste of it was like wafers made with honey” (Exodus 16:31).

It could not be stored. Each family gathered what it needed: “he that gathered much had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack.” Some kept it overnight against Moses’ word, “and it bred worms, and stank” (Exodus 16:18–20). Israel ate it “forty years, until they came to a land inhabited” (Exodus 16:35). Manna taught trust in the most practical way. There was bread for today, and tomorrow’s would come tomorrow.

“Give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11) asks God for what the manna gave: enough for this day. Christians of every church pray it for the needs of ordinary life. Luther’s Small Catechism says daily bread means “Everything that belongs to the support and wants of the body”, and its list runs from “meat, drink, clothing, shoes” (meat here meaning food) to “good weather, peace, health”. The Westminster Shorter Catechism, used by Presbyterians, says that in this petition “we pray that of God’s free gift we may receive a competent portion of the good things of this life, and enjoy his blessing with them.”

Catholics hear more than one meaning in it. The Greek word translated “daily”, the Catechism of the Catholic Church notes, “occurs nowhere else in the New Testament” outside the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:11; Luke 11:3), and it can be read in several ways. It means “what is necessary for life”, and read literally as “super-essential”, it “refers directly to the Bread of Life, the Body of Christ”. The Catechism quotes Augustine, “The Eucharist is our daily bread”, and Peter Chrysologus, who wrote that Christ “himself is the bread who, sown in the Virgin, raised up in the flesh, kneaded in the Passion, baked in the oven of the tomb, reserved in churches, brought to altars, furnishes the faithful each day with food from heaven.”

He said it the day after he fed five thousand people from what one boy had brought: “five barley loaves, and two small fishes” (John 6:9). The crowd took boats across the lake to Capernaum to find him, and he told them plainly, “Ye seek me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were filled” (John 6:26). They asked, “What sign shewest thou then”, and pointed to the manna: “He gave them bread from heaven to eat” (John 6:31).

Jesus answered that the manna had come from God, and that God now gave something greater: “Moses gave you not that bread from heaven; but my Father giveth you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world” (John 6:32–33). When they said, “Lord, evermore give us this bread,” he said, “I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst” (John 6:34–35).

He set himself beside the manna and beyond it. “Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead. This is the bread which cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world” (John 6:49–51). Manna kept people alive for a day. The bread Jesus offers is himself, and the life it gives does not end.

Melchizedek’s bread and wine

When Abram came back from battle, having rescued his nephew Lot, “Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine: and he was the priest of the most high God”, and he blessed Abram (Genesis 14:18–19). Christians read the meal as a sign of what was to come. Cyprian, who became bishop of Carthage about 248, wrote that “in the priest Melchizedek we see prefigured the sacrament of the sacrifice of the Lord”. The wine of that meal has meanings of its own, traced in what wine represents in the Bible.

The bread of the Presence

The bread of the Presence is the bread the King James calls shewbread. In the tabernacle a table stood before the Lord with this bread on it at all times: “thou shalt set upon the table shewbread before me alway” (Exodus 25:30). The priests baked “twelve cakes” of fine flour, set them “in two rows, six on a row”, renewed them “Every sabbath”, and ate the old loaves “in the holy place” (Leviticus 24:5–9). Week after week the bread lay before God, “by an everlasting covenant”. Its table and its story are told in what the showbread was.

Unleavened bread and leaven

At the first Passover, Israel ate the lamb “and unleavened bread; and with bitter herbs” (Exodus 12:8). There was no time for dough to rise: “they were thrust out of Egypt, and could not tarry” (Exodus 12:39). For seven days each year Israel ate unleavened bread, “even the bread of affliction; for thou camest forth out of the land of Egypt in haste” (Deuteronomy 16:3). In Matthew, Mark and Luke the Last Supper is a Passover meal, held on “the first day of the feast of unleavened bread” (Matthew 26:17; Mark 14:12), where Jesus said, “With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer” (Luke 22:15). John dates it differently: on the morning Jesus was tried, the priests still had the Passover to eat (John 18:28).

Leaven, which makes dough rise, became a picture of what spreads through a whole life or a whole people. Paul used it for sin: “Purge out therefore the old leaven… For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us: Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Corinthians 5:7–8). Jesus warned against “the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees”, and the disciples understood that he meant their “doctrine” (Matthew 16:6, 12). Yet he also said, “The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened” (Matthew 13:33). So leaven is not evil in itself. It is the picture of something small that works its way through everything.

Bread for Elijah

During the drought he had foretold, the prophet Elijah asked a widow of Zarephath for “a morsel of bread”. She had only “an handful of meal in a barrel, and a little oil in a cruse”, enough for one last meal for herself and her son. She baked for him first, and “the barrel of meal wasted not, neither did the cruse of oil fail” (1 Kings 17:11–16). Later Elijah sat under a juniper tree in the wilderness and “requested for himself that he might die”. An angel woke him, and “there was a cake baken on the coals, and a cruse of water at his head.” He ate twice, “and went in the strength of that meat forty days and forty nights unto Horeb the mount of God” (1 Kings 19:6–8), meat meaning the food. At the prophet’s lowest hour, God answered with bread.

Does Bethlehem mean “house of bread”?

Yes, in Hebrew. Jesus “was born in Bethlehem of Judaea” (Matthew 2:1), and the town’s Hebrew name, Beth-lehem, joins bayith, house, and lechem, bread. Strong’s Concordance and Smith’s Bible Dictionary both give its meaning as “house of bread”, though the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia mentions another possible origin, “the house of Lakhmu,” an Assyrian deity. The book of Ruth opens with “a famine in the land” that drove a family from Bethlehem to Moab, and Naomi went home when she heard “that the Lord had visited his people in giving them bread” (Ruth 1:1, 6). The Gospels make nothing of the name themselves. The link between the bread of life and the house of bread is one that readers draw.

In the Gospels Jesus takes bread, blesses it and breaks it before he shares it. When he fed the crowd, “he blessed, and brake, and gave the loaves to his disciples” (Matthew 14:19), and he did the same at the Last Supper. On the evening of the resurrection, two disciples walking to Emmaus did not recognise him until supper, when “he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him” (Luke 24:30–31). Back in Jerusalem they told the others “how he was known of them in breaking of bread” (Luke 24:35).

In Acts the phrase names the shared life of the first Christians. They “continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers” (Acts 2:42), “breaking bread from house to house” and eating “with gladness and singleness of heart” (Acts 2:46). At Troas, “upon the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread, Paul preached unto them” (Acts 20:7). Paul drew the meaning from the loaf itself: “The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ? For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread” (1 Corinthians 10:16–17).

Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, was taken under guard to Rome, where by early accounts he was put to death under the emperor Trajan. On the way he sent seven letters to the churches. In one he urged the Christians of Ephesus to keep together, “breaking one and the same bread, which is the medicine of immortality, and the antidote to prevent us from dying”.

On the night before he died, “Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body” (Matthew 26:26). Paul’s account adds a command and says what the meal proclaims: “this do in remembrance of me”, and “as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come” (1 Corinthians 11:24–26). Every church here keeps the Supper. They differ on what the bread is once it has been blessed, and each says so in its own words:

• Catholic. The Catechism quotes the Council of Trent: “by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord”, a change the Church calls “transubstantiation”.
• Orthodox. The Orthodox Church in America teaches “the real presence of Christ, His true Body and Blood mystically present in the bread and wine”.
• Lutheran. The Augsburg Confession teaches “that the Body and Blood of Christ are truly present, and are distributed to those who eat the Supper of the Lord”.
• Reformed and Presbyterian. The Westminster Confession says believers “spiritually, receive, and feed upon, Christ crucified”, his body and blood being “not corporally or carnally, in, with, or under the bread and wine; yet, as really, but spiritually, present to the faith of believers”.
• Southern Baptist. The Baptist Faith and Message, the Southern Baptist Convention’s confession, calls the Supper “a symbolic act of obedience whereby members of the church, through partaking of the bread and the fruit of the vine, memorialize the death of the Redeemer and anticipate His second coming.”

A free course, Christianity: What Christians Have Believed for 2,000 Years, covers what the churches share and where they differ.

Bread was made from grain, chiefly wheat or barley. When Ezekiel acted out the siege of Jerusalem as “a sign to the house of Israel”, he was told to make siege bread from a mixture, “wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentiles”, eaten “by weight” as the food ran short (Ezekiel 4:3, 9, 16). Grain was ground by hand: “Two women shall be grinding at the mill” (Matthew 24:41). Barley was the cheaper grain. When Elisha promised the end of a siege of Samaria, he said that “a measure of fine flour be sold for a shekel, and two measures of barley for a shekel” (2 Kings 7:1), and the boy who fed the five thousand had barley loaves. Dough was raised with leaven worked through “three measures of meal” (Matthew 13:33), or eaten flat when there was no time. Loaves were baked in an oven or on the coals, like the “cake baken on the coals” left for Elijah (1 Kings 19:6), and in a famine “ten women shall bake your bread in one oven” (Leviticus 26:26).

No. Scripture gives no general meaning to dreams about bread. Two dreams in the Bible have bread in them, and each was read for that one dreamer. Pharaoh’s chief baker dreamed of “three white baskets” on his head with birds eating the baked goods, and Joseph told him, “The three baskets are three days”, after which Pharaoh would hang him (Genesis 40:16–19). A man in the camp of Midian dreamed that “a cake of barley bread tumbled into the host of Midian” and knocked over a tent, and his companion read it as “the sword of Gideon” (Judges 7:13–14). Before he heard any dream, Joseph asked, “Do not interpretations belong to God?” (Genesis 40:8). Neither reading is a rule for anyone else’s dream, as dreaming of eating bread explains.

From the sweat of Adam’s face to the table at Emmaus, bread in the Bible is God’s daily kindness. In the end it is Christ himself, known, as the two disciples said, “in breaking of bread” (Luke 24:35).

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• What Was the Showbread in the Bible? The Bread of the Presence and Its Table
• Wheat in the Bible: What Does it Symbolize?
• Wine in the Bible: What Does Wine Represent? Joy, Christ’s Blood and Judgment
• What Did Jesus Eat? Bread, Fish, Wine and the Passover in the Gospels
• What Is Passover and What Does It Represent in the Bible?
• Communion Prayers: Before Communion, Over the Bread and Cup, and After