The staff of life -- revised

I've been baking flat bread today, 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.

Here are the early uses of the phrase "staff of life" listed in the OED:

1638 PENKETHMAN Artach. Ajb, Bread is worth all, being the Staffe of life.

1656 J. HAMMOND Leah & Rachel (1844) 9 Corn (the main staffe of life).
1698 FRYER Acc. E. India & P. 35 For Corn, they have Rice the Staff of the Land.
1860 All Year Round No. 45. 440 Barley bannocks and oat cake long remained the staff of life in villages in Scotland.
1901 D. SLADEN In Sicily I. 372 Broad beans form one of the staves of life in Sicily.n any event,

I'm still not particularly happy with my history of this phrase, and I plan to do more research into it soon. Or maybe I'll strike it lucky and someone who knows a lot more than I do will just leave a comment and clarify everything. In the mean time, though, I'm very happy with the bread I made. See above.

Comments

[Jake]

Oh ya.. Thanks for reminding me Craig.. Hey Gail, hows about an article on hardtack? Way more interesting than flatbread and you can segue into Moby Dick and literary stuff..