Unleavened bread (Exod 12:14-20)

When I spent a gap year in Israel, I remember whole sections of the supermarket shrink-wrapped before Passover so that customers could not access yeast-containing products. This is a regulation prescribed in our reading concerning the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the week-long celebration of Israel leaving Egypt in too much haste to wait for their bread to become leavened and rise. In the days of standing mixers with kneading functions, bread-makers and specially prepared dry yeast in packets in the supermarket, it is hard to appreciate how long breadmaking took in the ancient world.

Since yeast is hard to find at the moment, I have been looking into more traditional ways of breadmaking, which would have been similar to what ancient peoples used. It involves mixing some flour and water to create a starter dough. When wild yeast from the air makes its way into this mixture it feeds on the ingredients creating a frothy, foaming texture. By regularly feeding it with more flour and water for about a week, it becomes ready for use though will continue to need feeding, albeit less frequently, to keep it alive for subsequent occasions. Folding a portion of this leaven into a bread mixture will permeate the whole dough and ensure its rising. The actual breadmaking process is at least another day or so, which involves manipulation of the mixture with kneading and folding interspersed with periodic waiting for the dough to rise or rest before it is baked. A lengthy process for sure!

Once again, we are not told why leaven is not to be used beyond the historic reason that it commemorates the haste by which Israel had to leave Egypt (Exod 12:39). Nevertheless, grain offerings given to God likewise were to be without leaven (Lev 2:11), which suggests a negative connotation. Centuries later, this negative view is also reflected in the New Testament where Jesus compares the Pharisees’ hypocrisy to leaven (Luke 12:1) and Paul speaks of ‘the leaven of malice and wickedness’ (1 Cor 5:8).[1] The most likely explanation is that the fermentation involved in the process of making leaven is associated with decay and corruption, which has no place before God. Plutarch in the first century AD Roman context gives a similar perspective when he says that ‘Leaven itself comes from corruption, and corrupts the dough with which it is mixed… and in general, fermentation seems to be a kind of putrefaction’ (Plutarch, Quaest. Rom. 109).[2]

The command around leaven is emphatic and repetitious: it should be removed on the first day and abstained from for the week’s celebration that starts and ends with a holy assembly (i.e. worship before God) and a sabbath time of no work. Whoever eats leaven during this time shall be cut off (Exod 12:15, 19), a technical term for divine punishment, which involves either the (premature) death of the offender or his progeny.[3] Thus, this is a serious matter. As Israel leaves Egypt they enter from death into life, from the gradual erosion of their existence in hard labour into a flourishing and blossoming life with God. Death and corruption then have no place among them and the symbolic clearing out of leaven from their houses reminds them that they should not carry a piece of death from their previous existence with them into their new life. As Christians, we have been redeemed from death and sin. Let us not carry around a piece of decay then in the form of unhealthy practices (like an unforgiving attitude, jealousy or gossip) and deadly influences (whether through websites, films, books or relationships) that poison and corrupt our devotion to God.

[1] Though Jesus also uses leaven in a positive sense in a parable for how a little of it can permeate the whole (Matt 13:33).

[2] Cited in Jacob Milgrom, Levitius 1-16, AB (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 189.

[3] Ibid., 457. Milgrom also notes alternative views by modern scholars that this means excommunication or death by man. However, since the offence is primarily against God, the punishment also comes from Him.