A LOAF — the round baked loaf a portion of which is lifted out and given away before the rest is eaten (Numbers 15:20). ⚠ The word has outlived the law that uses it: the plaited bread on a Jewish Sabbath table is called challah not for its shape but for this verse, because it is made from dough from which a challah has been separated — a practice still kept, with the portion burned since there is no priest to receive it. The etymology is less settled than the afterlife: it is often derived from chalal, to pierce or bore, which would make it a perforated or ring-shaped cake, and that is the reading behind NWT 1984 'ring-shaped cakes' and TNM 2019 'roscas de pan'. It is a real proposal, not a certainty; KJV, ASV and Geneva print 'cake' and NIV 'loaf'. The dough itself is arisah, a genuinely rare noun occurring in only four verses in the whole Hebrew Bible — Numbers 15:20 and 21, and then Nehemiah 10:38 and Ezekiel 44:30, both of which are this same law being quoted back centuries later. → first discussed at Num 15:20