shavar

This is the ordinary word for buying grain or food, and it belongs almost entirely to one setting: a shortage severe enough that people must travel to where the food is. Most of its uses cluster in the story of Joseph, where famine drives a whole region down to Egypt to buy what they can no longer grow. Unlike the general verb for purchasing anything, קָנָה, this word keeps its eye on food and provisions.

The prophet Isaiah later turns the word on its head. Using the everyday language of the marketplace, he calls the thirsty to come and buy food and drink "without money and without price." The commercial verb becomes the very way to describe receiving what money cannot obtain, a free gift dressed in the words of a purchase.

A related form of the same verb flips the direction of the exchange: instead of the buyer acquiring grain, the seller dispenses it. This is the word for selling food out of a store, whether by Joseph as Egypt's administrator handing grain to a starving region, or by an ordinary trader. It runs close to the general verb for selling, מָכַר, but stays fixed on grain and food rather than goods of every kind.

The selling sense often carries a moral edge in the prophets and the wisdom writings. Proverbs blesses the person who sells grain freely during a shortage instead of hoarding it, while Amos condemns merchants who cannot wait for the sacred days to end so they can get back to selling, cheating with rigged scales as they do.