Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Jonathan Mohler <jonathan.mohler AT gmail.com>]

Thanks George,

Yes, John Leake brought the cognate languages to my attention, which basically threw my theory out the window.  I did suggest to Isaac Fried that maybe the לחם, to beat was newer than לחם, bread.  This is fraught with difficulty as well.  

I am not too concerned, however, with the bread/meat issue.  Swahili has a word whose root meaning means vegetable, mboga.   The Kenyan people, though, use it more generally as the "side foods."  The Luyia people consider ugali (maize mill mush) as the heart of the meal.  If they spoke Hebrew they might call their ugali lechem.  As such they consider everything else on the table as mboga, even meat.  The Turkana, a semi-nomadic tribe in the Northwest corner under Sudan, eat primarily meat, mostly goat.  To them anything outside of meat they call mboga (if they use Swahili). When I told some Turkana associates that the Luyia down south called meat mboga, they couldn't stop laughing.  No doubt, they would probably call meat lechem.

Most interesting to me is that ugali  (Swahili) is a Guttural-Liquid word; so is the okhula, to eat (Luyia).  Mboga is a Bilabial-guttural.  לחם contains all three consonant types Liquid-Guttural-Bilabial.  Add to all that the Heb. word אכל, to eat.  I am always on the lookout for universal root words (non-borrowed), especially from Bantu languages.

Jonathan E. Mohler

On Apr 14, 2013, at 1:06 AM, George Athas wrote:

I'm unconvinced, Jonathan. I think this is reading too much into etymology. I can't see how we get from 'beating' to 'eating bread'. Also, it doesn't explain the Arabic cognate, which means 'meat'. There are, it seems, two distinct roots: to fight, and to have a meal.

George and Mike:

My theory is that there is only one root, להם.  This original root is "to beat," hence "to fight." The idea of beating dough or kneading leads to the noun, lechem, bread.  Subsequently the a new verb arises as lacham, to have bread with someone.  A branching off from the original root, rather than two homonyms.

Jonathan E. Mohler