Abstract
The word ‘daily’ in the Lord’s Prayer does not reflect the fact that the original word in Aramaic or Hebrew must have been an unusual one to have needed translating by the rare, if not specially invented, Greek word epiousios. The petition in the Lord’s Prayer is likely to have been in the tradition of Proverbs 10.8, where the meaning is ‘sufficient, not too little and not too much’.
Keywords
It is one of the paradoxes of the Christian religion that the Lord’s Prayer, universally used by Christians and believed to have been taught by Jesus himself, contains a word in its Greek form (the earliest form known to us) which is so obscure that we cannot be sure of its meaning; indeed, this word epiousios is not merely unusual, it occurs nowhere else in surviving ancient literature. Despite this, it is translated in all modern languages by a word or a phrase that makes the subject of the petition almost banal: the bread which we are to pray for is daily. What the original word would have been is a highly technical question which will probably never be solved. But I want to suggest that we may do well to draw out the implications of this uncertainty and ask the more fundamental question: What is Jesus likely to have wanted us to pray for, and why did he have to use such a rare or idiomatic word for it that a Greek word may even have had to be invented to convey what he meant?
Already in the second century the oddity of the word epiousios struck Origen, who guessed that it was made up specially to translate a rare expression in the original. 1 Certainly, no other instance of it has been found in extant Greek literature or documents. If ‘daily’ had been the original meaning, there were several common Greek words available to translate it. What we have to account for is that none of them was used, and instead a word was chosen that was so rare that it has caused controversy ever since. This means that the original Aramaic (or possibly Hebrew) word must have been itself unusual, or at least one not easily rendered by a single Greek word. Hence the word almost universally used by Christians, ‘daily’ (or its equivalent in other languages), cannot be regarded as an adequate translation. The original cannot have been anything so ordinary, so banal.
We may start with the simple observation that, whatever Jesus meant, it is unlikely to have been to do with bread for tomorrow or for the future. A few verses later in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus specifically tells us not to take thought for the morrow and not to be concerned about food or clothing: our heavenly Father will make sure we have sufficient of these things. As a matter of method, it must be right to give priority to any sense which can be obtained for the petition that does not conflict with this explicit teaching. 2
A second observation concerns the word ‘our’, which has received too little attention. When I go to a baker to ask for bread and ask for ‘my’ bread or ‘our’ bread, this suggests that I have ordered it and come to collect it, or alternatively that I have some right to it – it is ‘mine’ by rights. In other words, this is not a simple request for bread; it is for bread on which I have some prior claim. Similarly in the Lord’s Prayer: if it is going to be ‘our’ bread, God must have promised it to us or apportioned it to us already. Whatever its precise significance in this context, the word ‘our’ makes it a very different petition from ‘Give us bread today’.
A third observation arises from the sociological analysis of the Gospels which has become a feature of interpretation in recent decades. 3 It is now generally agreed that the crowds who thronged Jesus and heard his teaching in Galilee were mainly of the class of casual agricultural labourers, whose ability to provide food for themselves and their families was constantly threatened by market conditions, variable harvests and capricious or exploitative landowners. It is hardly conceivable that Jesus would have tried to teach such an audience to pray for bread without allowing that they should pray for the physical sustenance which they were constantly in need of, even if he then led them to see a deeper, ‘spiritual’, meaning
This deeper meaning is what is explored in chapter 6 of John’s Gospel. Bread in a religious context immediately recalled Manna; and Manna was not something to be prayed for, it was a gift from God, a sign of his care for his people and an assurance of their survival in desert conditions. It was a blessing continually recalled, but one that came with a qualification: it was to be shared equally and never hoarded for the next day. The crucial authority for this was Exodus 16.4, ‘They shall gather a day’s portion for the day’. Following this, the rabbinic tradition discouraged prayer for food on the grounds that it implied lack of faith in God’s reliable provision; and at most it should be for just sufficient bread for the day’s needs, with no excess. Such prayers are rare in the Hebrew Scriptures or rabbinic writings, but a notable one occurs in the ‘Sayings of Agur’, the separate collection appended to the Book of Proverbs: ‘… give me neither poverty nor wealth, but provide me with the food I need’ (Prov. 30.8). We may assume that Jesus, when including the somewhat unexpected petition for food in his prayer, would have conformed to this tradition; if so, the word that he is likely to have used to qualify ‘bread’ must have been one that would have conveyed this essential limitation to need as opposed to abundance.
How would such a word have been rendered in Greek? In Proverbs 30.8, the Hebrew for ‘the food I need’ is lehem hukki. Hukki has a number of possible meanings, but the most appropriate one is ‘the bread which is assigned to me, which is my portion’. Significantly, the Septuagint does not attempt to translate this by a single Greek word, but renders it in a longer phrase, ta deonta kai ta autarkē, ‘what is needful and sufficient’, thereby associating the petition with the Stoic ideal of autarkeia, ‘self-sufficiency’, which turns up in Paul’s moral vocabulary. There was no current Greek word that would convey this; a whole phrase was needed for the translation. But Jesus’ prayer is terse and concise, so a single word was required, even if it did not convey the full meaning. Where was such a word to be found?
It has recently been convincingly argued 4 that the adjective epiousios is most likely to be a formation from the participle epiousa, which by the first century had become a word used on its own (the word hēmera, ‘day’, being understood) to mean ‘the coming day’. Used adjectivally to describe the bread that should be prayed for, it would naturally be understood to mean ‘coming’ in the sense of ‘coming to us’, ‘due to us’, and so ‘our’ bread. A translation such as ‘Give us today our apportioned bread’ is therefore likely both to convey the primary meaning of the original word in the prayer and also to conform to the warning of Jesus not to be concerned for tomorrow or for food and clothing. We are to ask only for that which God has apportioned to us, for what is ‘coming to us’ and so is ‘ours’, by his liberality and grace.
Does this matter? Even if this proposal is correct and even if it came to be accepted by scholars, there is no prospect of sufficient agreement ever being obtained for the centuries-old practice of Christians to be affected: ‘daily’ is certainly here to stay. But it is perhaps possible to influence what Christians may mean by the word when they say it in their prayers. And today this becomes startlingly relevant. Most Christians – in the West at least – are conscious of living in a world where they have access to far too much food, while the majority of their fellow humans have far too little. A more just distribution of the world’s resources is a high priority for any thinking religious person; and it should give added force to the Lord’s Prayer if it is realized that one of its petitions is exactly adapted to this concern: Give us our daily (apportioned) bread, i.e. not too little, but not too much.