Lentiles

Lentils are a small, common pulse used as an everyday staple in the biblical world. Four passages mention them — once as the price of a birthright, twice in lists of provisions, and once as the contested ground of a Philistine skirmish.

Esau's Bargain

The most famous appearance is the meal Jacob trades to his brother for the birthright: "And Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentils. And he ate and drank, and rose up, and went his way. So Esau despised his birthright" (Gen 25:34). The text underscores that an ordinary cooked dish — bread and lentil stew — is what Esau weighed his birthright against.

A Provisions List

When David crosses into Mahanaim during Absalom's revolt, allies bring out a long list of supplies that includes lentils among the staple foods: "brought beds, and basins, and earthen vessels, and wheat, and barley, and meal, and parched [grain], and beans, and lentils, and parched [pulse]" (2Sam 17:28). The lentils sit alongside the other grains and pulses that constitute basic field food.

Ezekiel receives a similar list, but as a prophetic prescription: during the long siege-enactment he is to make a single bread from a mixture: "You take also to yourself wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentils, and millet, and spelt, and put them in one vessel, and make yourself bread of them; [according to] the number of the days that you will lie on your side, even three hundred and ninety days, you will eat of it" (Ezek 4:9). Lentils are part of the famine-mix.

Shammah's Lentil Field

In David's mighty-men list a single skirmish gets remembered for the field where it happened: "And after him was Shammah the son of Agee a Hararite. And the Philistines were gathered together at Lehi, where there was a plot of ground full of lentils; and the people fled from the Philistines" (2Sam 23:11). The detail that the disputed ground was a lentil plot fixes the moment in agricultural memory.