I've been baking a lot of bread recently, which made me think of the phrase "Bread is the staff of life," and it occurred to me that I had no idea what it really meant. A staff is a walking stick -- so are we saying that bread is the walking stick of life? In what way is it a walking stick? Does it support life as it hobbles along?
Online Etymology Dictionary explains the origin of the term: Staff of life "bread" is from the Biblical phrase "to break the staff of bread" (Lev. xxvi.26), transl. Heb. matteh lekhem. This is translated into Latin as baculum panis, literally the walking stick or staff of bread. The walking stick of BREAD? Are we talking about a really long baguette here?
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, however, this is not (as I thought at first) a physical description of a long loaf of bread: to break the staff of bread is to cut off the supply of bread. It's a strange metaphor -- to break bread's walking stick -- so it's probably not all that unusual that it was rephrased in a later era. And indeed, by the seventeenth century, "supply, the walking stick of bread" becomes "bread, the walking stick of life," in other words its support and mainstay.
