Ekhal is to eat: to take food, consume, and at its stronger edge to devour. The plain bodily act of eating, which can intensify toward consuming something whole. The root is attested in Palestinian Aramaic; it is as close to the ground floor of a language as a verb gets.
The corpus uses it eighty-three times, and the range runs the whole scale of the root. Crowds eat and are filled on a hillside. Birds eat the seed off the path. Moth and rust eat stored treasure. The word can sit at a table or strip a field, and the teaching uses both ends, sometimes in the same breath, as when worry about what you will eat is answered by birds who neither sow nor store and eat anyway.
| Form | Pattern | Transliteration | Script | Standard | Qala rendering |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ekhal | Peal verb, perfect | ekhal | אכל ܐܟܠ | to eat | to eat · to consume · to devour (83 occurrences; PA / DJPA attested) |
| l-mekhal | Peal infinitive | l-mekhal | למאכל ܠܡܐܟܠ | to eat | something to eat (Matthew 25:35) |
| akhel | Peal active participle | ākhel | אכל ܐܟܠ | eating | eating: "the Son of Man came eating and drinking" (Luke 7:34) |
| Stem | Form | Sense |
|---|---|---|
| Peal | ekhal | to eat, consume, devour: the working stem throughout the corpus |
| Ethpeel | etʾekhel | to be eaten (grammar scaffold); not attested in this corpus |
| Aphel | awkel | to feed, give to eat (standard Syriac grammar); the sayings quoted here use "give to eat" (yab l-mekhal) instead |
| Pael / Ethpaal / Ettaphal | — | not attested in this corpus |
Eat one bite of something (just one) with complete attention: the reaching, the taste, the swallow, the fact that your life is being carried forward by it. This verb happens in you several times a day, almost always unwatched. Then hold the judgment scene next to it: the criterion there is not what you believed about hunger, but whether someone else got l-mekhal (something to eat) from your hand.
Hebrew ʾakhal, Arabic ʾakala, Akkadian akālu: the verb of eating is common Semitic stock, ancient and stable. Aramaic also grew a sharp idiom from it: to "eat the pieces" of someone, ekhal qarṣa, meant to slander them, to chew a person up behind their back, and in Syriac the devil's standing title, akhelqarṣa, is built on exactly that phrase: the piece-eater, the Accuser. Within the 75, this verb takes up L-Ḥ-M, bread (root 57), answers K-P-N, hunger (root 37), and walks in step with Sh-T-Y, drinking (root 60): "eating and drinking" is one of the corpus's fixed pairs.
Take two or three minutes and explain ekhal to a friend across its full range: the crowds eating on the grass, the birds eating the seed, moth and rust eating treasure. Then teach them the idiom: "eating someone's pieces" as Aramaic for slander, and let the point land on its own: the mouth's two appetites, food and reputation, share one verb.