The Bible on Hunger—A Source of Discomfort?

The England of Queen Victoria did not generally see a hungry world as a perpetual affront to civilization. Charity was a well-developed practice in the middle echelons of society, and the passing of the poor might well have posed the problem suggested by Charlotte Stetson:

When none need broken meat,
How can our cake be sweet?
When none want flannel and coals,
How shall we save our souls?
Oh dear! Oh dear!
The Christian virtues will disappear.

Pretending to speak for the rich on the subject, Walter Bagehot, nineteenth-century editor of the Economist, said, “It is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.” His near-contemporary, the American Ella Wheeler Wilcox, on the other hand, was regarded as running true to platitudinous form in averring that “just the art of being kind is all this sad world needs.” A deficient theology, but the hungry would gladly settle for it.

Hunger. A degrading condition. It can even overcome fear. The hungry have no ears for ideological or evangelistic appeals (a lesson perhaps belatedly learned). “God himself,” said Gandhi, “dare not appear to a hungry man except in the form of bread.” Hunger enervates, but it does more. There is a double destitution—the violation affects the spirit as well as the body. Hunger stunts the development of full personality, and should be seen against the background of wasted human resources. For the Christian, the battle against hunger is not an end in itself, nor merely a struggle to maintain existence; it calls for implementation in some sense of Jesus’ words: “I have come that men may have life, and may have it in all its fullness” (John 10:10, NEB). All human beings, as the Declaration of Independence points out, are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”

Hunger is a discomforting subject. Set out to investigate what the Bible has to say about it and diversion lights begin to flash all over the place. Hunger is specifically mentioned sixty-five times in Scripture (this includes metaphorical uses), but no responsible student would restrict his quest to that word alone. How could he ignore references to famine (100 of these), bread/food/manna (nearly 400), thirst (50), fasting (40), poverty (more than 200), even eating (900)? To these should be added kindred words such as want, and need, and this brings the total of verses to be surveyed to little short of 2,000.

If the torrent of words overwhelms one, however, so too does the interpretation. It can sweep us into any number of absorbing byways—all perfectly legitimate. Unless we have experienced real, prolonged hunger, there is a tendency to turn any study of it into an academic exercise. What, for instance, is the connection between hunger and the curses of Genesis 3? Why does God allow suffering? What is the link between famine and the working out of God’s purposes?

More than just controversial points of theology offers scope for peripheral discussion. We might ask why young people find so little practice of compassion in hometown Christianity that they go to non-Christian religions and conclude that in Buddhism and in the writings of the Hindu Rabindranath Tagore they find compassion in its highest form. Another promising diversionary topic is the administration of relief agencies: internal disaffections, overhead, inefficiencies, and jealousies between one and another.

In an earlier essay in this journal (“Awakening to a Hungry World,” October 24, 1975), I suggested that attitudes toward hunger might reflect a terrible failure of the imagination (cf. Jesus’ words in Matthew 25:42, “For when I was hungry you gave me nothing to eat …”). Goethe held that luxury destroys the imagination; certainly it is hard to grasp a disturbing phenomenon when a comfortable status quo depends on not grasping it.

Dwight D. Eisenhower once said that “the degree of our sacrifice in feeding the hungry is the degree of our understanding of the world today.” Even more is it the degree of our understanding of the Bible. We call ourselves a people of the Book, and because of what it says on other matters we attack the spirit of the age (not always remembering that we have helped to mold it), we crusade against vice, we jump to the guns at a whiff of heresy. We can adduce good biblical warrant for doing so (e.g., 1 Tim. 5:20). We are not called, however, to a ministry of rebuke alone (love is kind); we should have a parallel sensitivity when Scripture exhorts us to more positive humanitarian action. The Bible leaves us in no doubt about our responsibility toward the hungry.

Widespread hunger was known long before Joseph in Egypt, as Pharaoh’s second-in-command, suggested practical measures for famine relief (Gen. 41). Earlier in Egypt, as tomb inscriptions attest, the obligation to feed the hungry headed the “seven works of physical mercy.”

In ancient Israel, gratitude and obedience to God were associated with the commandment to love one’s neighbor (Deut. 15:7 ff.; 24:18 ff.). Blessing came through sharing one’s bread with the poor (Prov. 22:9, “The kindly man will be blessed, for he shares his food with the poor”), and even with a hungry enemy (Prov. 25:21 f., “If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat … and the Lord will reward you”; cf. Rom. 12:20). So far was this accepted as a bounden duty that one of Job’s friends attributed his plight to a lack of charity (Job 22:7). Job would have none of it: wherever he had failed, it was not there. He invited God’s chastising hand if he had been guilty of sins of omission in this area, such as, “if I have eaten my crust alone …” (31:16 f.). “Did not I weep for the man whose life was hard?” he challenges boldly. “Did not my heart grieve for the poor?” (30:25).

Isaiah too sees right behavior in terms of fulfilling certain responsibilities, such as “sharing your food with the hungry” (58:6 ff.); wrong behavior, on the other hand, “starves the hungry of their food” (32:6). According to Ezekiel, one of the marks of the righteous man is that he gives his bread to the hungry (18:7). The sin of Sodom was to have a surfeit of food but neglect the poor and needy (16:49, “This was the iniquity of your sister Sodom: she … had pride of wealth and food in plenty, comfort and ease, and yet she never helped the poor and wretched”).

The terrible effects of hunger are never underestimated in Scripture. To avoid hunger Esau was prepared to sell his birthright (Gen. 25:29 ff.). The hunger of Jesus was made the occasion of a diabolical temptation (Mark 4:1 ff.). Jeremiah frequently links hunger with the sword, but holds its results to be even more calamitous (Lam. 4:9 f., “Those who died of the sword were more fortunate than those who died of hunger; these wasted away.… Tender-hearted women with their own hands boiled their own children; the children became their food …”). Ezekiel speaks of the Lord’s sending upon Jerusalem “these four punishments of mine, sword and famine, wild beasts and pestilence” (14:21). Isaiah (3:1) and Amos (4:6) are also among those who speak of hunger as a divine punishment. In the New Testament, famine is coupled with other dire afflictions (Matt. 24:7; Mark 13:8; Luke 21:11; Rom. 8:35; Rev. 6:8; 18:8).

Ezekiel further refers to a time when God’s free and fearless people “shall never again be victims of famine” (34:29 f.; cf. Isa. 49:10). John the Divine makes it clear that they “who have passed through the great ordeal … shall never again feel hunger” (Rev. 7:14 ff.).

Good came from hunger in one notable parable: the starving Prodigal “came to himself” and returned to his father’s house (Luke 15:17). Another parable was told because legalism had over the centuries eroded and distorted the commandment to neighborly love (Luke 10:25–37). The good Samaritan showed that such love was to evince no respect of person; it was enough that someone was in need. At its highest (but not its most characteristic), Greek philosophy endorsed that: three centuries earlier, Aristotle had met a challenge to his almsgiving by saying, “I had mercy on the man, not on his bad morals.” The Christian (at his highest) could say no less, but would add that unique motivation: “In His Name.”

John the Baptist urges those who have food to give to those who have none (Luke 3:11, “The man with two shirts must share with him who has none, and anyone who has food must do the same”), and the whole tenor of the Gospels makes it clear that the obligation increases with the capacity of the giver (Luke 12:48, “When a man has been given much, much will be expected of him; and the more a man has had entrusted to him, the more he will be required to repay”; cf. Mark 12:42 f.; Luke 21:2 f.). The Epistle of James in an often quoted passage scoffs at the absurdity of resorting to words alone when there are needy people to be helped; such concern it regards as an integral part of religion that is “without stain or fault in the sight of God” (Jas. 1:27). First John (3:17 f.) makes a similar indictment and utters a similar warning: “But if a man has enough to live on, and yet when he sees his brother in need shuts his heart against him, how can it be said that the divine love dwells in him?”

Noted as one of the features of the apostles’ testimony to the Resurrection was a changed attitude toward personal possessions, to the benefit of the needy (Acts 4:32 ff., “… they had never a needy person among them, because all who had property in land or houses sold it, brought the proceeds of the sale, and laid the money at the feet of the apostles; it was then distributed to any who stood in need”). The call for just such a changed attitude was surely implicit in the report of the 1937 Oxford Conference (The Churches Survey Their Task): “The Christian message should make clear the obstacles to economic justice in the human heart, and especially those that are present in the hearts of people within the Church.” It was changed hearts that thwarted Emperor Julian the Apostate’s fourth-century efforts to suppress Christianity. “We ought to be ashamed,” he told his officials. “Not a beggar is to be found among the Jews, and those godless Galileans [i.e., Christians] feed not only their own people but ours as well, whereas our people receive no assistance whatever from us.” We underestimate the power of love.

Through all his concern that the needs of others should be met, Jesus warned his followers against preoccupation with their own physical needs (Matt. 6:31; Luke 12:22). He sent them out without bread (Mark 6:8; Luke 9:3), and taught them to pray for such sustenance daily (Matt. 6:11; Luke 11:3). There is ample biblical evidence, indeed, to support Nikolai Berdyaev’s statement: “Where our bread is concerned, it is a material matter. Where our neighbor’s bread is concerned, it is a spiritual matter.”

When Jesus raised Jairus’s daughter, the incident did not stop at a miracle by the Son of God; there was true humanity and a profound lesson in the postscript: “He … told them to give her something to eat” (Mark 5:43). That has something to say to us who belong to what Helmut Hollwitzer calls “that third of humanity which is concerned with slimming cures.”

An old Hasidic story tells of a rabbi who was rebuked by his students for giving his last coin to a beggar. He replied, “Shall I be more particular than God, who gave the coin to me?” One of the more subtle pitfalls into which we can fall is in regarding the hungry as objects of our generosity. We are all the objects of God’s generosity—“the earth is the LORD’s and all that is in it” (Ps. 24:1). Our fellowship with him is all of grace, and stems from his compassion.

Another danger is in forgetting the timeless message contained in the Lord’s feeding of the five thousand: that even the need of today’s vastly expanded world is not too great for the resources available—if it is the Lord who directs the use of those resources.

J. D. Douglas is an author and journalist living in St. Andrews, Scotland. He received the Ph.D. from Hartford Theological Seminary. He is the editor of The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church.

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