I am looking for the origin of the phrase "break bread" meaning to eat (or, I expect, to share food). I know that it can be sourced to the book of Acts but I have also seen many websites which say that it is older than that, reflecting a biblical era practice of sharing food to solemnize a meal, just with no actual references. What language does the phrase come from or is it an invention directly into the English?
Learn English – To Break Bread — the origin of the phrase
cultural-phrasesetymologyexpressions
Related Topic
- Learn English – Origin and meaning of the American 1960s slang phrase, “bread is”
- Learn English – Origin of the phrase “under your belt”
- Learn English – the origin of the phrase “pinky promise”
- Learn English – Did the slang term “The Bomb” meaning “Very Cool” come from the American Jazz scene
- Learn English – Origin of the phrase “mother’s ruin”
- Learn English – the origin of “Boxing Day”
- Learn English – the origin of the phrase “I’m game”
- Learn English – Does “cafe” relate to the word “cafeteria?”
Best Answer
We find it in the Wycliffe bible. I quote here from the 1395:
Wycliffe worked from the Latin Vulgate, in which we find fractio panis.
However, the earlier Greek has the expression too:
[I could well be mis-highlighting the second example.]
While the practice of breaking rather than cutting bread, even when knives are available, is seemingly an old one, the expression is not heavily used in pagan sources, and is in Christian sources.
Edit: Could there be an earlier source?
Well, social sharing of food is probably as old as society; mammals generally feed their young, and chimpanzees share food they have collectively hunted, so we can imagine that there was some social value to food sharing among humans from whatever time you want to start calling them human.
For similar reasons, socio-religious sharing is probably as old as religion. It's found in ancient religion ("reversion of offerings" in Ancient Egyptian religion for example), and through to the very recent (of the top of my head, Judaism, Islam, Voodoo, Wicca, Hinduism all have some form of food sharing I can think of, even Jains end Paryushan with a communal meal, and they see starving to death as the ideal way for a monk to die).
Religious associations for bread, are likewise about as old as bread. The oldest cuneiform writings include Sumerian poems which are at once myths about the invention of bread, and bread recipes: Read the myth, and you're reading the recipe. (I haven't tried these, though I have tried one of the contemporaneous beer recipes, though alas without success).
And tearing rather than cutting bread is common everywhere from ancient times to today, and from peasants to haute cuisine.
So just about anywhere and any time, can we find what is needed for "break bread" to become a turn of phrase.
It does seem though that it doesn't exist earlier in this way. While some components are pretty universal as I suggest, and some tied into specific earlier views (e.g. combining the Last Supper and beliefs of the Second Coming, Isaiah 25:6-9 was now seen by the Christians as a prophesy of a new view on the Messianic feast), it seems the particular combination of these common themes gives us the expression.
Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack though. It also doesn't help that there are biases on such matters. Many Christian sources are biased toward claiming phrasings and customs they practice to be innovations of the early Christians. People inclined to revise Christian history (quite prominently many atheists, modern pagans and Christians of denominations that don't share a particular feature) are often biased toward claiming they aren't. In practice, each are as likely to muddy waters as the other. But while I've certainly seen Neopagans pointing to the provenance of bread-based traditions to argue "breaking of bread" isn't specifically Christian (and I'd quite agree for the reasons given above, though I disagree with the assumption that modern pagan forms are entirely uninfluenced by Christian Eucharist and perhaps even by Seder), I've seen nothing to suggest that the turn of phrase is; not even some spurious cases, and I've seen a lot of spurious claims about the provenance of all manner of things from pagans.
So, breaking bread is no more exclusively Christian than breathing air is, but the expression to break bread probably does originate with the early Christians.