Bread as metaphor

Bread is used as much as metaphor as it is food. The most obvious examples that come to mind are from the Bible, in both the Christian and Hebrew texts. A simple search for the word "bread" in an online bible yields hundreds of results, and familiar stories abound. The book of Exodus reminds us that when the Jews were lost and starving in the desert God fed them with manna, or bread from heaven. And sometimes directions are pretty specific. In the book of Ezekiel, for example, the prophet is instructed to take wheat, barley, beans, lentils, and millet and make bread out of them for nourishment while he too was in the desert. In the New Testament Jesus uses bread as the ultimate metaphor when he refers to it as His body: blessed, broken, and shared. After more than two millennia this is still practiced in the form of Holy Communion each Sunday in Christian churches around the globe. And one of the most powerful Biblical metaphors is in the Lord's Prayer, where people pray to God for their life's necessities, while using the words Daily Bread. These, of course, are just a few examples of many.

Bread as religious metaphor is not limited to Judeo-Christian tradition or inspiration. Rumi, the 13th century Islamic mystic and poet, who is an important figure in Sufism and is usually accredited with the Whirling Dervishes, dedicated or inspired an entire series of poems to bread and how it mirrors life. To this day, in fact, bread is such an integral part of many Middle Eastern diets that in some Arabic dialects it is referred to as esh or aysh, meaning life.

The act of sharing bread or an entire meal together is sometimes referred to as "breaking bread." This is also the basis of the modern word companion, which is derived from the Latin phrase com pani, which loosely translates to with one whom bread is shared (com: with or together; pani: bread). Other modern, albeit slightly dated, examples are in the form of slang. Money is sometimes called "bread" or "dough." [cheftalk.com]