to eat: to take something in and use it up, whether food into a body or anything into a force that destroys it
At its core this is the ordinary word for eating a meal, and most of its hundreds of uses are exactly that: people and animals taking in food. The picture underneath the word is simple and physical, taking something in until it is gone.
That same picture stretches naturally in two directions. Because eating is the most basic shared human act, the word carries the weight of meals as relationship: the covenant meal, the festival, the host who feeds a guest, the worshiper who eats before God. And because eating uses a thing up, the word becomes the standard way to say that fire, the sword, drought, or an enemy nation devours and destroys what it falls on.
A third, gentler stretch keeps the idea of taking in but points at benefit rather than destruction: to eat the fruit of your work or the good of the land is to enjoy and live off it. Hebrew can also turn this against a person, so that one eats the fruit of one's own ways, that is, has to live with the results of them.
These are not separate words but one word seen from different angles. The reader tells them apart by who is doing the eating and what is being eaten: a person and bread, worshipers and a sacrifice, fire and a city, a worker and the harvest.