bar

Hebrew has several words for grain, and this one names the kernel itself, what is left once the stalks have been beaten and the chaff blown away. That is why it turns up wherever grain is being handled as a quantity: heaped into storehouses, poured into sacks, loaded onto donkeys, weighed out on scales, bought and sold.

Because the word points to the cleaned kernel, it can also stand for what is genuine and worth keeping. When Jeremiah asks what straw has to do with grain, the subject is not farming but truth, and a dream that is merely a dream is the straw.

A few poetic lines stretch the word forward in time and use it of the crop still growing, filling the valleys and running up the hillsides. There the harvest is as good as gathered already, and grain becomes a picture of a land under blessing.

Neighboring words divide the same field differently:

• "dagan" (דָּגָן) is the ordinary word for grain as one of the land's staple crops, usually named alongside new wine and olive oil.
• "shever" (שֶׁבֶר) names grain precisely as merchandise, the thing a hungry family goes down to Egypt to buy.
• "qamah" (קָמָה) is the crop still standing in the field, before the sickle touches it.
• "chittah" (חִטָּה) is wheat, one particular cereal rather than grain of whatever kind.

One line in Job, describing the wild mountain goats and deer that no one owns or feeds, appears to use a different word that happens to be spelled the same way. Borrowed from Aramaic, it means the open country beyond the settlements and the plowed fields. The young of these animals grow strong out in the open and never come back.

Biblical Aramaic uses this word plainly. In Daniel the beasts that live beyond human control are called the animals of the open country, and the Aramaic word for that open country, "bar" (בַּר), is the very word Job seems to be using. Hebrew otherwise has no use for it, which is why the reading in Job leans on the neighboring language rather than on Hebrew habit.