to bake: to cook bread or cakes with dry heat, in an oven or on hot stones
This is a narrow, steady word. It means baking, and only baking: producing bread or cakes by surrounding dry heat, whether inside a clay oven, on a griddle, or on hot stones and embers. It is never used of boiling (בָּשַׁל) something in liquid, and never of roasting (צָלָה) meat over a fire. Those are separate words, and the Bible keeps them apart. The same narrow sense shows up across the ancient languages related to Hebrew, without drifting into a general word for cooking.
The word works in two ways. Most often it names the plain act of baking, done in a home kitchen or, in the priestly instructions, in the sanctuary. But its participle is also used as a noun, "the baker": a person whose work is baking. In a royal court that became an actual office.
- Pharaoh has a chief baker
- Samuel warns that a king will draft the people's daughters to serve as bakers
- by Jeremiah's day Jerusalem had a street named for its bakers
Though the verb itself is ordinary, what gets baked often carries great weight. It is the unleavened bread hurried out of Egypt, the special bread and cakes brought to the sanctuary, and, in one searing image in Hosea, an overnight oven that pictures a nation's hidden political conspiracy flaring into violence at dawn.
Nuances
Whether the preposition on the word "baker" in Hosea 7:4 is agentive (the oven is "heated by a baker") or privative (the fire burns "without needing a baker," picturing passion out of control).
- majorityAgentive: the oven is fired and tended by a baker, the reading behind most translations.; Francis I. Andersen and David Noel Freedman, Hosea (Anchor Bible 24, 1980); A. A. Macintosh, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Hosea (ICC, 1997)
- minorityPrivative: the fire burns without needing a baker, an image of uncontrolled passion.; Hans Walter Wolff, Hosea (Hermeneia, 1974)
Whether the word in Hosea 7:6 is the noun "their baker" (the received Hebrew text) or should be repointed to "their anger," which would take the verse out of the occurrences of this verb.
- majority"Their baker": the received text, the sleeping baker of the overnight-oven simile; retained.; Francis I. Andersen and David Noel Freedman, Hosea (Anchor Bible 24, 1980); A. A. Macintosh, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Hosea (ICC, 1997)
- minority"Their anger": repoint the vowels, following the Aramaic Targum, so the line describes smoldering rage rather than a baker.; Hans Walter Wolff, Hosea (Hermeneia, 1974)