limos

This is the plain Greek word for having no food. It covers a range that English divides between two words: the crisis that empties a whole region's storehouses, which we call a famine, and the empty stomach of one person, which we call hunger. Greek used the single word for both, so the same term names the failed harvest and the ache it produces in a body.

Luke's story of the runaway son turns on exactly that range. A severe shortage of food strikes the country he has moved to (Luke 15:14), and a few verses later he says of himself that he is dying of the very same thing (Luke 15:17). English needs "famine" in the first line and "hunger" in the second; Greek keeps one word, so the public disaster and the private ruin are named identically. Paul writes the same way when he lists what he has endured: going without food stands beside going without water and warmth (2 Corinthians 11:27). What sets this word apart from the verb for feeling hungry (πεινάω) is that it names the shortage itself, the condition, rather than the person's sensation of it.

On the larger scale, the word belongs to an old list of the ways a land dies. Israel's prophets named sword, famine and plague together as the instruments of judgment, and the New Testament keeps that pattern:

• famines arrive alongside plagues and earthquakes among the signs Jesus foretells
• the rider on the pale horse is given power to kill by sword, by famine and by death
• famine falls on doomed Babylon in a single day, together with death and mourning

At the same time the word stays firmly on the ground. Two of its appearances report real, dated disasters: the shortage that drove Jacob's family into Egypt (Acts 7:11), and the one under the emperor Claudius that moved the church in Antioch to send relief money to Judea (Acts 11:28). Whether a nation has no grain or one man has no bread, this word means bodily deprivation, and it kills.