Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

I. A rumor of bread

In the fields of Moab a woman gets up.

10 years earlier she arrived here with a husband and two sons, because there was famine in the land they left behind. The book that tells her story sets the famine and the name right next to each other in its first verse: there was famine in the land, and a man went away from Bethlehem — the house of bread.1 Whoever lives there and has no bread lives in a name that no longer fits.

Moab was to be survival, and it became a grave: first the husband died, then both sons. A woman is left, Naomi, with two Moabite daughters-in-law — three widows in someone else's land.

Then, in the middle of that story of dying, comes one verse about bread: "She arose, she and her daughters-in-law, and returned from the fields of Moab, for she had heard in the field of Moab that YHWH had looked upon his people to give them bread."2

That is all she has. No letter, no invitation, no provisions for the road. A rumor — that at home there is giving again. She is, as far as Scripture tells it, the only human being who walks back because she has heard that bread has been given. On what she has heard, she starts to walk.

The people she is heading toward has an old history with daily bread, and that history hangs on four tables. Above all four, Scripture sets the same expression: the day's portion on its day. The first time it sounds, it is shouted.

Egypt has just withdrawn the straw. From now on the people must gather stubble themselves, and the slave drivers beat time: complete your work, the day's portion on its day, as if there were straw. Whoever falls short of the quota is beaten, and the foremen of Israel get the question every driver asks: why not finished, not yesterday and not today?3

Three Hebrew words, and here they smell of brick clay and the lash. In Egypt the daily is something a person has to deliver, every day again, to someone who never has enough.

The same three words return in a wilderness, 11 chapters further on, and by then everything about them has changed except the form. "See, I will rain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather the day's portion on its day."4 No longer a quota that has to go up — a gift that comes down. What the driver demanded turns out here to fall from heaven, in exactly the same wording, as if the language itself wants you to hear the difference.

And they return twice more, both times at a table in Babylon. There sits an old king of Judah who has spent 37 years in prison. A new ruler lifts up his head, speaks kindly to him, sets his chair above those of the other kings and lets him eat at the table, every day: "a fixed allowance was given him by the king, the day's portion on its day, all the days of his life."5

It is real kindness — and it remains the kindness of the power that destroyed his city. Jehoiachin eats every day, for life, from the hand that took him captive.

And in that same Babylon, with an earlier batch of exiles, the court assigns a group of boys the day's portion on its day from the royal food and from the wine the king himself drinks. It is a privilege, and it is a program: three years at this table, and you belong to the palace. Then it says that Daniel resolved not to defile himself with it.6 So the daily can also be refused — precisely when it comes from the wrong table.

Four tables, with the same three words above them. With Pharaoh the daily is a quota. With Jehoiachin's host a favor. At Nebuchadnezzar's court a program — and Daniel declines. Once, only once, it falls from heaven.

Each table, moreover, makes something different of the one who eats. At Pharaoh's he is a slave; at Babylon's a pardoned prisoner, or an apprentice who is to become the court. Only under the open sky is he none of these — just someone who is hungry, picking up what has been laid down for him.

The woman on the road from Moab has nothing to trade at any of these tables. She has no quota left to deliver and no court that grants her an allowance. She has a rumor, and it is one of the last kind: not that there is something to earn, but that there is giving.

II. Where the bread falls

What precedes the bread in the wilderness is not a prayer. It is grumbling.

The whole congregation grumbles against Moses and Aaron, and the memory of slavery is already being touched up: if only we had died in Egypt, when we sat by the pots of meat and ate bread to the full.7 That is not how a slave remembers his chains — but it is how he remembers his pot. Moses sets the matter straight, twice, with the same words: your grumbling is not against us, it is against YHWH.8

And then comes YHWH's answer to the grumbling that was aimed at Him. It is no thunderclap. It is a menu: tonight meat, and tomorrow bread to the full.9

They grumbled, and He fed them. There is no rebuke in between. No one who wants to know what kind of God this is can get around that order: the first thing this Father does with complaining children is set the table.

And it did not stop at one season. For 40 years, until they came to the edge of the inhabited land, the bread kept falling.10

One thing is said with the bread that makes it double: that I may test them, whether they will walk in my law or not. Bread and testing, in one verse — and it is the only verse in the whole Hebrew Bible where the two stand together.11

With this God the daily bread is at the same time the school: enough every day, never to be hoarded, and every morning the question again whether you dare to count on the Giver for tomorrow.

How that school goes on to work — the spoiling of what was kept, the sabbath exception, the hand that stays out of view — has already been told in full in this house and need not be told again here.12

The book of Ruth does not mention the wilderness, and the wilderness does not know Ruth; it is this chapter that lays the two side by side, and it says so. But this is what then lies side by side: a God who first feeds grumbling children — and a woman with empty hands on her way to Him, on nothing but the news that He is giving again.

III. Bitter water

When the road from Moab ends, the whole of Bethlehem is stirred.

Two women enter the town: Naomi, and the Moabite woman who has clung to her.13 The women of the town say: is this Naomi? 10 years and three graves lie between that question and her answer.

She asks for another name, a bitter one, and says why in one sentence that shows her hands: full I went away, and empty YHWH has brought me back.14 And then the book adds its point in time, dry as a diary entry: they came to Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest.15

The empty woman arrives at the moment the land stands at its fullest.

Her people too, on the way to the bread, first came past bitter water. Three days — that is how long it takes before a people that has walked through a sea is thirsty again. They sang on the shore, with tambourines, and then the procession turned into the wilderness of Shur. Three days of nothing.

Then, in the distance: water. They hurry, they kneel at the edge — and spit it out. It is bitter, and the place is named after it to this day: Marah.16

The grumbling begins here already, and here too Moses takes it where it belongs. And then YHWH does something small: He points out a piece of wood. It goes into the water, and the water becomes sweet. There, at that one spring, He gives the people a statute and an ordinance — and then a sentence no one had seen coming, for it is not a command. It is a self-introduction: I am YHWH, your Healer.17

Three days after the sea, at the first setback of freedom, He says who He wants to be for this people — of his own accord, unasked, to a grumbling people at a bitter spring. And the very next stop is the wilderness of Sin, where the bread falls. He heals before He feeds; it is the same journey, and the same hand.

Having come bitter into the house of bread, Naomi stands at the beginning of a harvest she did not sow.

IV. The word no one knows

The bread petition itself carries, in the Greek in which it has been preserved, a riddle that has become invisible in translation.

"Our daily bread" — but the word rendered there as "daily" is a word that no one else uses. It stands in the two versions of this prayer, and nowhere else in Scripture. Already in the early church people were at a loss with it; what exactly it means is undecided to this day.

One thing may be said about it, and it is enough: the family of this prayer has its own word for its bread. What the child asks of the Father every day is called, in the language of the prayer, something that does not exist outside this prayer — as if this table has its own household word. The prayer is at its most ordinary where its language is at its strangest: in the middle of the petition for bread stands the only word that occurs nowhere else.

Naomi's town carries its bread in its name; the family of this prayer carries its own in a word that exists only at this table. You know a house by words like these. And whoever pulls up a chair does not need to be able to explain it — explaining is for scholars; pulling up a chair is for children.

V. Give — and keep giving

Matthew and Luke each give the bread petition in their own form, and together the two forms say more than either does alone.

Matthew writes give, and "this day": one day, one gift, today. Luke writes keep giving, and "day by day": a tap that may stay open. It is an ordinary stylistic difference between two evangelists; neither corrects the other. But what each form says is there all the same: the one petition fits the morning on which the gathering is done, the other the journey of 40 years.

And Matthew's "this day" has an echo further on in his own chapter: "so do not worry about tomorrow."18 Whoever asks for today does not have to carry tomorrow as well.

And then Luke's form. Keep giving — that imperative is scarce in the New Testament, and the other places where it sounds are not prayers. They are commands, to us: "give to the one who asks of you."19 What the child asks of the Father with this word, the Son commands the child with this same word, toward everyone who asks the child for something. The house passes it on.

In Bethlehem one can see what that passing on looks like, at an ordinary meal at harvest time. Ruth has gone gleaning behind the reapers, on a plot of land that turns out to belong to Boaz, and at mealtime he calls her over: "Come here, eat of the bread and dip your piece in the vinegar." He hands her roasted grain; she eats, is satisfied, and has some left over.20 It is the second time her book speaks of bread, and the last. The first time it was a rumor — that YHWH had given it. Now it is a piece in the hand of a foreign woman, handed to her by a man at his table.

And what she has left over she carries into the town that evening and gives to her mother-in-law.21 That is how the given bread reaches Naomi: not as rain from heaven, but as the remainder of a meal — handed over by the one hand, passed on by the other. The rumor on which she set out from Moab has become a piece of bread in her hands.

VI. One table too many

There is one more table in Scripture, and it is the last of its kind.

The word "bread" falls in the Bible exactly once in Aramaic, and it falls in a banquet hall: Belshazzar the king made a great feast — לְחֶם רַב — for his 1,000 nobles, and he drank wine before the eyes of the 1,000.22 The order follows to fetch the vessels that had been taken from the temple in Jerusalem, and the wine goes round in the tableware of the house of God.

Then come the fingers of a human hand, and they write on the plaster.

That same night his kingdom is numbered and ended.23 The only Aramaic bread in Scripture stands on the table of a king who does not know that this is his last meal.

Scripture itself has set the other table of Babylon beside it — one book, two tables — and they mirror each other down to the gesture: Belshazzar brings the holy things to his table; Daniel refuses what comes from his own.

The boy who refused the royal food and asked for vegetables and water looked better after 10 days than those who ate at the court's table — and he outlived the empire itself: "and Daniel remained until the first year of King Cyrus."24 The same city, two tables. The fullest table in Babylon fed no one that night; the barest kept a man alive until beyond the fall of the kingdom.

Not every laid table feeds. That is the last lesson of the three words with which this chapter began, and the reason the bread petition has an address. It does not ask the daily of the table that demands it, nor of the table that grants it as long as the host lives. It asks it of heaven.

And in Bethlehem the book that began with famine and three graves reaches its last page. The harvest is over; at the gate the redemption has taken place, Boaz has taken Ruth as his wife, and then the book records its quietest miracle with the same verb with which the rumor began: YHWH gave her conception.25

The women of the town — the same ones who asked at the arrival: is this Naomi? — now stand around one house and say: a son has been born to Naomi. They call him Obed; he is the father of Jesse, the father of David.

And Naomi takes the child and lays him in her lap.

The hands that came empty into the house of bread are the last thing the book shows, and they are full. She had gotten up on a rumor: that there was giving again. Her book ends with the gift in her lap.