ḥallah

The lexica treat this as a single noun for a baked bread cake and differ only over how much shape to read into it. BDB glosses "cake, usually perforated" and connects the noun to חלל in the sense of piercing; HALOT prefers a ring-shaped bread cake; DCH is content to gloss it as a cake or loaf without committing to a shape. The derivation is widely accepted but not demonstrable from biblical usage, since no text describes a hole or a pricked surface, and the versional evidence is unspecific: the Old Greek generally renders the noun ἄρτος, using κολλυρίς at 2 Kingdoms 6:19, both of which point to a small round loaf without settling the question of shape. The distribution is heavily cultic: the oven-baked variety of the מִנְחָה (Lev 2:4), the ordination bread of Exod 29:2, 23 and Lev 8:26, the Nazirite's basket in Num 6:15, 19, the loaves accompanying the תּוֹדָה sacrifice in Lev 7:12-13, and the twelve loaves of the לֶחֶם הַפָּנִים in Lev 24:5. Milgrom (Leviticus 1-16) and Levine (Leviticus, JPS) both treat the חַלֹּת of Leviticus 2 and 7 as one of the recognized bakery forms of the cereal offering, distinguished from the רָקִיק wafer by having oil mixed into the dough rather than smeared on the surface afterwards; on their reading the leavened loaves of Lev 7:13 stand outside the general exclusion of leaven from the altar because they accompany the sacrifice and fall to the priest and the worshipper rather than being burnt. Lev 24:5 is the outlier in scale, two tenths of an ephah for each loaf, well beyond the hand-sized offering cakes, so the noun is best taken as unspecific about size. Num 15:20 is the one occurrence outside a sanctuary list: the first of a household's dough is to be lifted as a תְּרוּמָה, and commentators divide over whether the noun there denotes an already-baked cake or, by extension, the portion separated from the batch, the latter understanding being the basis of the dough offering codified in Mishnah Hallah; Milgrom (Numbers, JPS) discusses the relation of the biblical instruction to that later institution. 2 Sam 6:19 keeps the word in plain use for a loaf distributed to the people, which supports treating the cultic occurrences as applications of an ordinary domestic term rather than a priestly coinage. On the material side MacDonald and Borowski describe hand-shaped loaves baked in a domestic clay oven, which matches the one baking instruction these texts give for the item (Lev 2:4, baked in an oven).