a severe shortage of food, whether a whole land's famine or a single body's hunger
TranslatabilityPartialCertaintySettled
One word covers the whole span from a nation gripped by famine down to one starving person, because both are the same thing seen at different sizes: food has run out and life is threatened. Most often it names a public catastrophe that empties a region, drives families to migrate, and kills slowly. In the prophets it is one of the standard tools of judgment, named in the same breath as the sword and deadly disease, the three ways a covenant people could be brought to ruin.
The same word also names the plain bodily experience of going without food. The shift is one of scale, not of meaning: the hunger of a besieged city and the hunger of an individual are described with the one term.
From there it stretches once, famously, into a picture: a famine not of bread but of hearing the words of the LORD, where the thing in fatal short supply is God's own speech. The image works precisely because everyone already feels what a literal famine is.
Nuances
1afamine as a widespread disaster that empties a land, often sent as judgment alongside sword and plague
the Hebrew word reaches down to one person's hunger as readily as a whole land's, so it can describe an individual the English word famine would not naturally fitJob 5:20
Both
both name a severe, often deadly shortage of food across a landGen 41:30
Only famine
famine in English almost always means a large-scale, public food crisis affecting a region or nation, narrowing what the Hebrew leaves open
Names the disaster itself: a regional or national shortage of food, an event that strikes a whole land rather than one person.Gen 12:10Gen 41:27Rut 1:1
Lasts over a stretch of time and is counted in years, something that comes and ends across a land, not a momentary state.Gen 41:30Gen 45:62Sa 24:13
Stands beside war and plague as one of God's instruments of judgment on a nation.Jer 14:12Jer 15:21Ki 8:37
Describes a person who lacks food: an individual's bodily hunger, the felt emptiness of someone who has not eaten.1Sa 2:5Psa 107:5Pro 27:7
Names the kind of person you are commanded to feed: the hungry one set before you whom you give bread, in contrast to a condition over a whole land.Isa 58:7Isa 58:10Ezk 18:7
Can be satisfied verse by verse: God fills the hungry soul with good, an individual's need that a single meal answers.Psa 107:9Psa 146:7
רָעֵבthe verb to be hungry, the act of going without food, where this word is the resulting state or shortage.
Names the prolonged regional crop failure that drives whole peoples to migrate, the engine of the Joseph and patriarchal narratives.Gen 12:10Gen 41:27Gen 47:4
Stands as one of God's covenant judgments on the land, listed beside sword and plague as the way the nation is disciplined.Jer 14:121Ki 8:372Sa 24:13
Both
Both name a sweeping famine that strikes a whole region or nation, the Greek word regularly carrying over the Hebrew sense of widespread scarcity of food.Gen 41:30Act 11:28
Both can stand as an instrument of divine judgment that brings death, famine riding out as a killer alongside sword and pestilence.Jer 11:22Rev 6:8
Stretches to one person's private hunger and destitution, not only a public crisis: the prodigal starves alone in a far country, and Paul lists hunger among his personal sufferings.Luk 15:14Luk 15:172Co 11:27
Appears as one of the end-time signs of upheaval, paired with wars and earthquakes in Jesus' picture of the last days.Mat 24:7Mrk 13:8Luk 21:11
What scholars say about ra'av
Standard lexica treat the word as a single noun spanning famine and hunger, built on the root for being hungry. It is concentrated in the narratives of patriarchal and prophetic crisis and is a fixed member of the prophetic triad of sword, famine, and plague used for covenant judgment, especially in Jeremiah and Ezekiel.
Sources
HALOT, s.v. רָעָבlexicon
BDB, s.v. רָעָבlexicon
DCH, s.v. רָעָבlexicon
G. Gerleman, "רעב to be hungry," in TLOTtheological-dictionary