bread

Distinctions

lechem (לחם)

Root ל-ח-ם. That lechem means bread may not be its literal sense at all but only a colloquialism: the article reports hearing from Rabbi Dr. Guy Matalon that lechem denotes the staple food of a society, which takes on different meanings by society. Among Klal Yisrael bread is the staple, so lechem is bread; in Arabic culture the staple is meat, so lahm is meat. On that reading, the column adds, historians cannot settle the original meaning of Beis Lechem (Bethlehem), which could be read "House of Bread" or "House of Meat." The same root gives lochem, to wage war, and milchamah; wars were fought over the food supply, and the root also carries soldering or pressing things together, which fits both bread, whose parts are fused in baking, and combatants closing with each other on a battlefield. At Bamidbar 21:5 the Manna is called lechem haklokel, the insubstantial bread.

kikar (ככר)

The word seems literally to mean a circle. In Tanach it most commonly means a talent of gold or silver, and secondarily a valley ringed by mountains; loaves being commonly round in shape, it came also to mean a loaf, in the phrase kikar lechem (Shemos 29:23, Shoftim 8:5, Shmuel I 10:3, Yirmiyahu 37:21, Mishlei 6:26, Divrei HaYamim I 16:3). The Mishnah later shortens the phrase to kikar alone, and there kikar for bread is frequent, where in Tanach it is not.

challah (חלה)

A baked cake of flour; Jastrow renders it specifically a rolled or rounded meal-cake. Nearly every occurrence in Tanach is a meal-cake offered as a korban; the one exception is Bamidbar 15:20, the mitzvah to separate a special tithe for the kohen, taken from every dough destined for a meal-cake, and in the Mishnah, above all in maseches Challah, the word generally means that tithe. The everyday sense, any loaf of bread, is vernacular and later.

pat (פת) and pita (פיתא)

Pat in Hebrew, pita in Aramaic. Radak (to Shmuel I 2:36): a broken piece, a morsel. The imperative pasos at Vayikra 2:6 means to break into pieces. Of fourteen occurrences in Tanach, eleven are the phrase pas lechem, a piece of bread. In practice pas simply became another synonym for bread, which is how Mishnah and Gemara commonly use it; Targum even renders kikar as pas sometimes (Onkelos to Shemos 29:23).

rifta (ריפתא) and nahamah (נהמא)

Both Aramaic words for bread in the Gemara; nahamah also runs through the Zohar. Of nahamah the column reports that some linguists claim it is probably borrowed from the Persian nan, "bread." Rifta it calls apparently related to the Arabic raghif, a flat loaf; linguists, it reports, hold that rifta was originally written with a tzadi, tying its root to retzef/ritzpah, a floor, which is likewise flat, the tzadi in Aramaic having morphed into an ayin that was then dropped. In Tanach rifos are pounded or softened grain (Shmuel II 17:19, Mishlei 27:22). Rabbi Nosson of Rome (Sefer HeAruch) explains Talmudic rifta as a meal of two identical loaves; the column adds that these probably had some other food in the middle, an early form of what we call a sandwich, and notes in passing the tradition crediting the sandwich to John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich.

Rendering guidance

• לחם in a pasuk: "bread." Where the sense is clearly provisions generally rather than a baked loaf, "food" or "sustenance" is right, but do not use it for a pasuk that is talking about actual bread.
• ככר לחם: "a loaf of bread." A bare ככר in Tanach is a talent (weight) or a plain; in the Mishnah it is a loaf. Check which corpus you are in before reaching for "loaf."
• חלה: in Chumash and in the korbanos, "meal-cake." In the Mishnah, "challah," the separated portion, and say so in a gloss. Never write "challah bread" for either; the modern Shabbos loaf is not what the sources mean.
• Trap: English "loaf" will take both kikar and challah, and English "bread" will take lechem, pas, kikar and challah together. Where two of them stand in one phrase (kikar lechem, pas lechem), keep the head noun distinct: "a loaf of bread," "a piece of bread," never "some bread" for both.
• פת: "morsel" or "piece of bread" where the breaking is in view; plain "bread" in ordinary Rabbinic usage (pas shacharis, pas akum), where the sense of breaking has worn off.
• Aramaic ריפתא/נהמא in a sugya: "bread." Do not carry the rifos sense of pounded grain into them.

Sources

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Let Them Eat Bread," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 10 Tammuz 5778 (2018-06-23); raw text at sources/whats-in-a-word/raw/7815-let-them-eat-bread.md. Primary loci cited: Bamidbar 21:5 (lechem haklokel) and 15:20; Shemos 29:23 with Targum Onkelos; Shoftim 8:5; Shmuel I 10:3 and 2:36 with Radak; Yirmiyahu 37:21; Mishlei 6:26 and 27:22; Divrei HaYamim I 16:3 (the article prints "I Chon. 16:3"); Vayikra 2:6; Shmuel II 17:19; maseches Challah; Rabbi Nosson of Rome, Sefer HeAruch, s.v. rifta; Jastrow on challah.

The article closes its opening by saying that these terms are not all synonyms for one thing but differ slightly from one another, which is what the distinctions above set out.