flour: grain ground down at the mill, the ordinary everyday grade a household bakes with rather than the finest sifted kind
This is what grain becomes once it has passed between the millstones. Isaiah pictures the work itself when he tells fallen Babylon to take up the handmill and grind flour (Isaiah 47:2), and the rest of the Bible shows the result: something you knead, shape and bake the same day. It can be wheat or barley, and it is always the last stage before dough.
Because flour was the staple, it became the natural way to measure what a person or a kingdom had in hand. The same word covers:
- an ephah of it carried up to the sanctuary at Shiloh (1 Samuel 1:24)
- sixty large measures a day for Solomon's court (1 Kings 4:22)
- one last handful in a widow's jar at Zarephath (1 Kings 17:12)
Hebrew also knows a finer, sifted flour (סֹלֶת), and the two are not the same thing. Solomon's daily supply lists both, with twice as much of the ordinary flour as of the fine (1 Kings 4:22). Abraham tells Sarah to hurry with three measures of the two words stacked together (Genesis 18:6), naming the good grade of the everyday stuff. And when the law prescribes the plainest possible offering, it asks for barley flour with no oil and no incense added (Numbers 5:15), which is exactly what makes it plain. In every case the word marks the point where threshed grain (בַּר) has stopped being loose kernels and become something a cook can work with.
Hosea turns the word into an image of failure. The point of a stalk of grain is that it should end up as flour, so to say the standing grain will yield none (Hosea 8:7) is to say the harvest was pointless from the start.