Give us this day our daily bread. — A strange obscurity hangs over the words that are so familiar to us. The word translated “daily” is found nowhere else, with the one exception of the parallel passage in Luke 11:3, and so far as we can judge must have been coined for the purpose, as the best equivalent for the unknown Aramaic word which our Lord actually used. We are accordingly thrown partly on its possible derivation, partly on what seems (compatibly with its derivation) most in harmony with the spirit of our Lord’s teaching. The form of the word (see Note in Excursus) admits of the meanings, (1) bread sufficient for the day now coming; (2) sufficient for the morrow; (3) sufficient for existence; (4) over and above material substance — or, as the Vulgate renders it, panis super substantialis. Of these, (1) and (2) are the most commonly received; and the idea conveyed by them is expressed in the rendering “daily bread.” So taken, it is a simple petition, like the prayer of Agur in Proverbs 30:8, for “food convenient for us;” and as such, has been uttered by a thousand child-like hearts, and has borne its witness alike against over-anxiety and far-reaching desires for outward prosperity. It is not without some hesitation, in face of so general a concurrence of authority, that I find myself constrained to say that the last meaning seems to me the truest. Let us remember (1) the words with which our Lord had answered the Tempter, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4); (2) His application of those words in “I have meat to eat that ye know not of” (John 4:32); (3) His own use of bread as the symbol of that which sustains the spiritual life (John 6:27-58); (4) the warnings in Matthew 6:25-31 not only against anxiety about what we shall eat and drink, but against seeking these things instead of seeking simply the kingdom of God and His righteousness — and we can scarcely fail, I think, to see that He meant His disciples, in this pattern Prayer, to seek for the nourishment of the higher and not the lower life. So taken, the petition, instead of being a contrast to the rest of the Prayer, is in perfect harmony with it, and the whole raises us to the region of thought in which we leave all that concerns our earthly life in the hands of our Father, without asking Him even for the supply of its simplest wants, seeking only that He would sustain and perfect the higher life of our spirit. So when we ask for “daily bread,” we mean not common food, but the “Bread from heaven, which giveth life unto the world.” So the reality of which the Eucharistic bread is the symbol is the Lord’s gracious answer to the Prayer He has taught us.
II. — THE WORD “DAILY,” IN Matthew 6:11.
The word ἐπιούσιος has been derived (1) from ή ἐπιοῡσα (sc. ἡμέρα)=the day that is coming on; and this meaning is favoured by the fact that Jerome says that the Hebrew Gospel current in his time gave the word mahar (= crastinus) to-morrow’s bread, and by the very early rendering, quotidianum, in the Latin versions. On the other hand, this meaning introduces a strange tautology into St. Luke’s version of the prayer, “Give us day by day — i.e., daily — our daily bread.” (2) The other derivation connects it with οὐσία in some one or other of its many senses, and with ἐπὶ as signifying either “for” or “over” — the former force of the preposition suggesting the thought “for our existence or subsistence;” the latter, the supersubstantialis of Jerome, that is, “over or above our material substance.” It is said, and with truth, that in classical Greek the form would have been not ἐπιούσιος, but ἐπούσιος; but it is clear that that difficulty did not prevent a scholar like Jerome from accepting the derivation, and it was not likely that the Hellenistic Jew who first translated our Lord’s discourses should be more accurate than Jerome in coining a word which seemed to him wanted to express our Lord’s meaning. The derivation being then admissible, it remains to ask which of the two meanings of οὐσία and of ἐπὶ gives most force to the clause in which the word occurs, and for the reasons given above I am led to decide in favour of the latter. New words would hardly have been wanted for the meanings “daily” or “sufficient.” When a word is coined, it may fairly be assumed that it was wanted to express a new thought, and the new thought here was that which our Lord afterwards developed in John 6, that the spirit of a man needs sustenance not less than his body, and that that sustenance is found in the “bread of God which cometh down from heaven” (John 6:33). The student should, however, consult Dr. Lightfoot’s admirable excursus on the word in his Hints on a Revised Version of the New Testament.
On the assumption that the Lord’s Prayer included and spiritualised the highest thoughts that had previously been expressed separably by devout Israelites, we may note, as against the meaning of “bread for the morrow,” the saying of Rabbi Elieser, that “He who has a crumb left in his scrip, and asks, ‘What shall I eat to-morrow?’ belongs to those of little faith.”
There is, it must be admitted, a difficulty in conjecturing what Aramaic word could have answered to this meaning of ἐπιούσιος, and the fact that a word giving the other meaning is, as it were, ready to hand, and was actually found in the Hebrew Gospel in the fourth century, has some weight on the other side. That word may, however, itself have been not a translation of the original, but a re-translation of the Latin quotidianus; and the fact that Jerome, knowing of this, chose another rendering here, while he retained quotidianus in St. Luke 11:3, shows that he was not satisfied with it, and at last, it may be, halted between two opinions.