Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread: Matthew 6:11 Meaning

"Give us this day our daily bread" is Matthew 6:11, the fourth petition of the Lord's Prayer, and it is usually read as a request for the food and provision you need today. The surprise is in the word "daily." The Greek behind it, epiousios, appears nowhere in surviving literature outside this one prayer, and nobody is certain what it means.

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The line, in two translations

Give us this day our daily bread. Matthew 6:11, KJV

Give us this day our daily bread. Matthew 6:11, BSB

Identical, and that is worth noticing. The Berean Standard Bible works from modern critical texts and still lands on the same eleven words the King James translators used in 1611. So do the NIV, the ESV, the NASB and the CSB. Almost nothing else in the Bible is this locked.

Luke has the same petition in a shorter version of the prayer:

Give us day by day our daily bread. Luke 11:3, KJV

Give us each day our daily bread. Luke 11:3, BSB

Two differences matter. Matthew says "this day," Luke says "each day," which turns a single request into a standing one. And the verbs differ in Greek: Matthew uses a one-time imperative, give, while Luke uses a continuous one, closer to keep giving. Matthew asks once for today. Luke asks for a supply line.

Everything else is the same, including the strange adjective sitting in the middle of both. Translation choices like these change what a verse asks for, which is why it is worth reading verses with their context and explanation attached rather than on their own.

The word nobody can translate

Epiousios is the only adjective in the Lord's Prayer, and it is the hardest word in it.

Here is the full inventory of where it occurs in ancient Greek: Matthew 6:11, Luke 11:3, and the Didache, an early Christian handbook that quotes the prayer. That is it. Three appearances, all of them the same sentence. Outside this prayer, the word does not exist in the surviving record.

That matters more than it sounds. Translators normally settle a rare word by looking at how other writers used it: in a letter, a contract, a shopping list, a poem. With epiousios there is nothing to compare. The meaning has to be reconstructed from the parts of the word itself, and the parts point in more than one direction.

Origen noticed the problem first. Writing in the third century, and one of the most capable Greek readers the early church produced, he says in On Prayer 27.7 that the word is not used by any Greek writer, whether in philosophy or in ordinary speech, and appears to have been formed by the evangelists. A native speaker looked at it and concluded somebody had made it up.

There is one famous exception to the "nowhere else" claim, and it has not held up. In the twentieth century a word transcribed as epiousi was reported in an Egyptian shopping list papyrus, next to grocery items, which looked like evidence for a sense of "enough for today." The papyrus then went missing for years. When it was rediscovered at Yale's Beinecke Library in 1998 and re-examined, the word was read as elaiou, meaning oil, and the document was redated to the first or second century rather than the fifth (Nijman and Worp, Novum Testamentum 41, 1999, following an earlier question from Bruce Metzger). The reading is now generally treated as unreliable, though you will still find the papyrus cited as genuine in otherwise careful writing, including Pope Benedict XVI's Jesus of Nazareth.

The proposals for what the word means fall into three families.

Daily. Read epi as "for" and ousia as "being," giving bread for the day being lived. This is the oldest surviving Latin reading, quotidianum, recorded as early as Tertullian, and it is what Tyndale, the King James translators and most modern English versions chose. The objection is that every other place the New Testament says "daily" it uses a form of hemera, the ordinary word for day, which is absent here. If Matthew wanted "daily," he had several plain ways to say it.

Needed for existence. Read ousia in the sense of substance or subsistence, giving bread necessary for life. Origen favored a version of this, though he then took the bread toward nourishment for the mind and soul rather than the pantry. The Syriac versions, translated early and into a language close to the one Jesus spoke, went in this general direction. Same objection applies: ordinary Greek words for necessary already existed.

For tomorrow. Link the word to epiousa, "the coming day," which shows up elsewhere in the New Testament for the next day. Jerome noted in his commentary on Matthew that the now lost Gospel of the Hebrews used the Aramaic mahar, tomorrow, at this point. Most scholars today think this is the likeliest reading. Against it: Greek already had a normal adjective for tomorrow, aurion, which Matthew uses a few verses later in the same chapter.

Then there is Jerome's own decision, which is the cleanest evidence that the question was open by the fourth century. In the Vulgate he rendered the word in Matthew as supersubstantialem, coining a Latin word that had not existed, which is why the Douay-Rheims reads "give us this day our supersubstantial bread." In Luke, the same Greek word, he left as quotidianum, daily. The 1979 Nova Vulgata still keeps the split. Whether that reflects genuine uncertainty or simply a lighter hand when revising Luke, nobody can say. Either way, the standard Latin Bible of the western church contains two different answers to one word.

This is not the only famous phrase that turns out to say something other than what everyone assumes. "I die daily" works the same way: a sentence everyone can quote, carrying a meaning the text does not actually supply.

What each reading changes

Each family makes the petition ask for a different thing.

Bread for today makes it a prayer about dependence. You ask for one day's worth and no more, which means asking again tomorrow, which means never reaching the position where you do not have to ask. That is the reading most Protestant commentary works with, and it fits the immediate context in Matthew, where Jesus goes on to tell people not to be anxious about tomorrow.

Bread for tomorrow makes it a prayer about provision, and possibly about something larger. Raymond Brown argued that every other petition in the prayer looks forward to God's kingdom arriving, so it would be odd for this one alone to be about groceries, and that the bread in view is the bread of the age to come. Eduard Schweizer pushed back: ordinary bread was never part of the picture of the messianic banquet, and the plain need for food would have been the most universal thing Jesus' hearers had in common. Brant Pitre, who is Catholic, accepts that "for tomorrow" is where the scholarly majority sits while objecting that almost no ancient interpreter read it that way.

Supersubstantial pushes the petition toward the spiritual and, for many readers, the eucharistic. Jerome's Latin sits behind a long tradition of hearing communion bread in this line, supported early by writers including Cyprian and Augustine, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church still lists that as one of the senses the word carries. Eastern Orthodox writers often prefer a similar reading, sometimes combined with "the bread of the coming age."

What is worth knowing is that the disagreement does not run neatly along denominational lines. The eucharistic reading is rejected by Protestant scholars including Eugene Boring and Craig Blomberg, on the grounds that the ritual did not yet exist when the prayer was given. It is also rejected by Catholic scholars including Raymond Brown and Jean Carmignac. Meanwhile the "for tomorrow" reading was argued for by Cyril of Alexandria in the fifth century and revived in modern times by Albert Schweitzer, a Lutheran.

Nobody has closed this. Anyone who tells you the word plainly means one of the three is telling you their tradition's answer, which is fine, as long as you know that is what you are hearing.

Bread in the rest of the story

The petition is not the first time bread arrives one day at a time.

In Exodus 16, Israel in the wilderness is fed with manna, and the instruction attached to it is specific: gather what you need for the day, and do not keep any of it until morning. The people who tried to store it found it spoiled. The arrangement was designed so that yesterday's provision could not cover today, which is a strange way to run a food supply unless the point was the asking rather than the eating.

Proverbs runs a version of the same request. Agur asks for neither poverty nor riches but for the food that is his portion, and gives the reason: too much and he will forget God, too little and he will steal.

In the Gospels Jesus twice feeds a crowd from a handful of loaves, and in John 6 the crowd that ate comes looking for more. He turns the conversation and calls himself the bread of life. That is where the spiritual reading of Matthew 6:11 finds its clearest anchor elsewhere in Scripture, whatever epiousios turns out to mean.

The line has also gone somewhere the other passages have not: into ordinary English. "Daily bread" now means anyone's basic livelihood, with no religious sense attached, in the same way as many other phrases from Scripture that ended up in everyday English.

What it means to pray it

Whatever the word means, it does not mean much. That is the point of it.

You are asking for one day of ordinary supply. Not security, not a margin, not the arrangement where you never have to think about it again. The request is for enough, and Proverbs is explicit that plenty was considered its own hazard.

For some people praying this line, that is not an idea. Food is an actual question this week, and the prayer is the plainest thing in the prayer. For others it is a line said over a full fridge, and it asks something different: not for the food, which is already there, but for the honesty to notice that having it was never guaranteed and was not entirely arranged by you. Both are real prayers. Neither one is the practice version of the other.

The ordinary shape of praying it is small. You name what today actually needs, in the amount today actually needs it, and you stop there. Then you do it again tomorrow, which is the part that does the work. If you want a structure for praying a verse rather than just reading one, this seven day plan walks through it verse by verse.

A note on Our Daily Bread the devotional

Our Daily Bread is also the name of a devotional booklet published by Our Daily Bread Ministries, in print since 1956 and distributed in dozens of languages. This site has no connection to that organization, and this page is not their reading for today. If that is what you came for, you can find it at odbm.org. What you have here is an article about the line in Matthew that gave the booklet its name.

The short version

The most repeated sentence in Christian history contains a word that appears nowhere else, that a native Greek speaker in the third century thought had been invented, and that four hundred years of English Bibles have translated the same way largely because Tyndale did. Daily might be right. It might be for tomorrow. It might be the bread that is not bread at all.

Most verses have something like this underneath them and almost never get asked about it. Ave sends one verse a day with a button that explains what the sentence actually says, in plain English.