Recently, I reviewed a discussion by a prominent Hebrew scholar (Scholar) and student of the Ivory Tower, Yeshiva University School of Theology, whom I greatly respect. One of his primary fields of research is the Jewish and Hebraic origins of Christianity and the point where Christians ceased to be a Jewish sect and branched into a new faith. He is most famous for an edgy book claiming to definitively identifying the corrected pronunciation of the Tetragramaton, the four letter name of God.
In the current discussion, Scholar spoke at length about the faulty ways Exodus 12 is so often misunderstood or misapplied. This passage references the Passover feast, a practice retained as normative in the Church until well into the fourth century. Scholar’s main main point in Exodus was the distinction between matsah unleavened bread, chamets leavened bread, and seor leaven or proof. He maintained that Christian readers of Exodus and of the Pauline Epistles would likely be confused by the difference and condemn the wrong practices with regard to Rabbinic Passover.
To better understand the issue, we need to define some terms. Proof is a term from the practice of bakery meaning the yeast culture that is cultivated in order to sufficiently infect dough, brew, mash, or new wine. In bread making, something containing yeast like the leaves of a raw cabbage, or a sample of old bread or beer, is added to warm water and sugar and allowed to grow into a bubbly sludge. This proof is then added to the water and flour as the dough is made so that it can infect the whole lump with yeast.
Leaven is another word for proof, or yeasty sludge that can make bread, beer, pickles, wine, sour-mash for distilled liquor, yogurt, etc. When we refer to leavened bread, we mean bread allowed to ferment with leaven or proof in the dough and then baked into a light airy loaf. When we refer to unleavened bread, we refer to flat breads like matzohs, chapati, soda bread, pie crust, filo, tortillas, anything bread-like that contains no yeast. So any study of Passover is going to concern itself with the Hebrew words for Leaven, Unleavened Bread, and Leavened Bread. Scholar’s examination of the words themselves is quite enlightening and it was a pleasure as always to take instruction from this well spoken and generally humble Doctor of Hebrew Language.
Sadly, he took this opportunity to engage in an extreme eisegesis of the passage because the text itself does not support his personal theology. This is a failing that affects us all. It is natural for people to read themselves back into any text, it happens even more readily with something that affects our spiritual and psychic well being. In this case there are some wider considerations to his interpretation of Exodus 12.
First off let’s look at his assertions:
- In English translation this passage is confusing because very different Hebrew words are all translated as leaven.
- Chamets means leavened bread specifically, seor means leaven proof.
- Bread will rise without yeast if it is left long enough.
- Bread proof is a sample of old bread that is put into the new dough.
- Strong drink like whiskey is made by fermenting alcohol more.
From the top, let’s look at that assertion that English blurs chamets and seor into one thing. Exodus 12:15 in the Allepo Codex reads thus,
טו שבעת ימים מצות תאכלו–אך ביום הראשון תשביתו שאר מבתיכם כי כל-אכל חמץ ונכרתה הנפש ההוא מישראל–מיום הראשן עד-יום השבעי
Shivat yamim matsot tochaylu--ad Bayyom harishon tishbitu seor mivatichem ki kol-ochayl chamets vegichretah hanefesh haho' miyisrael miyom harishon ad-yom hashvi'i.
In the KJV it reads,
Seven days shall ye eat unleavened bread; even the first day ye shall put away leaven out of your houses: for whosoever eateth leavened bread from the first day until the seventh day, that soul shall be cut off from Israel.
While in the NASB it reads,
Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread, but on the first day you shall remove leaven from your houses; for whoever eats anything leavened from the first day until the seventh day, that person shall be cut off from Israel.
Interestingly I’m not seeing this blurring to which he referred. As highlighted, seor is clearly called leaven and matsot are translated unleavened bread in both. The words unleavened and leavened may seem close to a non-English speaker, but anyone passingly familiar with English will realize that the un- prefix clearly gives the opposite meaning. In fact, since the word matsah comes from a root that can mean to drain away, un-leavened has a good semantic match because it conveys the idea that something is missing that would normally be there.
Now, chamets, while slightly different between English translations is easily distinguished from leaven. So it’s pretty clear that the translation is in no way confused here. At least till we get to his second assertion that “chamets means [specifically] leavened bread and not other products of fermentation.” Instead KJV and NASB distinguish chamets from seor, but they don’t agree with each other as to the meaning. Here’s where a small controversy enters the picture. Does chamets, as Scholar asserts, really mean leavened bread only, or does it really mean all things that are, like leavened bread, fermented? To answer that question we have to look at other texts.
Throughout the Tanach we see the word lechem used to mean bread. Beit-lechem, Bethlehem, is the House of Bread. When Moses first met Jethro, Jethro scolded his daughters for not giving the nice Egyptian man lechem, bread. The uses are numerous and the meaning is consistent.
Lechem is bread, specifically leavened bread. This is to be contrasted with matsot, which are unleavened bread. So what is going on in the camp of the Hebrews, when God command that no leaven may be found in their midst for seven days? Is this just about not eating fluffy bread as a reminder that they were in a hurry when they left Egypt? Of course not.
Leaven is a metaphor for the corruption of Egypt. In Egypt henkit-pankit, literally beer and bread, were used to reference living a blessed life. The blessings of Faro(Pharoah, Wheat) and the pagan gods was to have a full belly and a beer buzz. To this day, hany-panky is a common Jewish idiom meaning naughtiness and evil. Because Egyptian piety was evil before the God of the Jews.
So the purpose of the banishment of seor was to clear away the trappings of Egyptian sinfulness, among an Ivri people who were so Egyptian they were called Egyptians by the Midianites as they crossed the Sinai.
To get a better understanding of the word chamets, let’s look at the hebrew word for pickles. Pickles are a product of fermentation. vegetables and fruits are pickled by emersion and storage in vinegar, a substance produced by yeast during a second fermentation of alcohol. Another method is to use a salt bath which attracts yeast molds that produce lactic acid to grow. The Hebrew word for these tasty treats is חמוצים, chamotsim. This is a direct extension of the same Hebrew root chamets we find in Exodus 12. So if lechem means bread and derivations of chamets mean fermented foods, this clearly points to chamets meaning all things contaminated with seor — ie things fermented, including wine, pickles, cheese, etc.
One of Scholar’s arguements is that chamets must specifically refer to leavened bread only, in his explanation of seor or leaven. He describes it as yeast proof and passingly links it to henkit, Egyptian liquid bread or beer. Then things get weird as he tries to explain how seor, the leaven, is necessarily a bread as well.
He undermines his own, well earned, credibility by describing a substance and a process that are factually incorrect and childishly fanciful. In his defense, Scholar admits going into the discussion and repeats several times that he is neither brewer, baker, nor cook. However, it is incumbent on one who is using a sidereel craft to support a scholarly argument to study that craft well enough to make coherent and rational statements about it. This, sadly, is not his approach to bakery.
Proof is an important part of bakery. It is a yeast culture and, as Scholar points out, is encouraged to grow quicker by the inclusion of sugars like honey and malt. But, proof is not bread. It is a foul smelling slurry of raw starch, water, and optional sugar — thoroughly infected by by mold spores such as brewers years, vintners yeast, or sour bread yeast.
In his attempt to make chamets refer to bread, Scholar took a short meander through an experiment with making unleavened bread rise. What he didn’t mention and maybe didn’t realize is that yeast molds are air-born and pollute the environment wherever there are people. People are natural carriers of yeast mold. Where we live and work, yeast will grow wild in the environment. If you leave dough sitting long enough, the people near it will be seor enough to contaminate it and cause it to rise.
One would presume that the God of creation would know all of this background. Theologically speaking; if the Torah is prophecy, if the God of Avraham is real, if the Passover is legitimate and not an empty tradition built from nothing; then God knew the difference between bread and seor and would have said lecha seor or some such construction to remove the confusion at some point in the declaration. And, in Exodus 13, this is used Instead, in 12:15 we are told not to allow chamets for seven days. No yeast may be found in our midst.
Finally, homeh sekar. A brawler is strong drink. Another tangent he took is the last bullet point above, in an attempt to tie his theology to bread, he made the statement that Strong Drink is made by fermenting wine more, or harder, or longer. This embarrassing assertion comes from a common mistranslation of sekar as fortified wine. This is a common enough mistake found in the mishnah, so doesn’t originate with the admirable teacher I refer to as Scholar. But even real study of israeli viticulture reveals that the Hebrew for fortified wine is yayin mechozeq.
Archaeologically, we know that distilled liquor was common in bronze age Mesopotamia and Greece. In proverbs 20 we have a direct reference to wine in a standard poetic parallelism contrasted with with sekar, strong drink. So it is eisegesis to impose the idea that the prophet would be unaware of distilled liquor and use such a vague parallelism that the intensification on wine is to cite vinegar (as some translations have done) or fortified wine. Further, God is aware of liquor. If he inspired Solomon to write proverbs 20:1, he would have been aware of the difference between Assyrian Whiskey and Israeli Sherry.
So why is this important? Because the declaration against chamets during pashach, Passover, isn’t a declaration against grain or flour of any age. It isn’t a declaration against soft bread so you will remember how hard it was to flee Egypt. It isn’t about matsot except in that leavened bread is a highly visible connection to Egypt and to the corruption exemplified by Egyptian yeast products. We see this in the fact that Exodus 13 leads straight into a judgment against any who find the road tough and yearn to return to the relatively easier life as a slave in Egypt.
So; if those who keep pickles, wine, cheese, vinegar, etc. during Passover have violated the commandment against seor; have they been excommunicated from the congregation of the faithful? The Talmud was meant to fence in the law and keep people from accidentally crossing lines. Are those who kept to matsos but drank Manischewitz in ignorance stricken from the Knesset?
I’m reminded of two things. In the Tanach we have record of David eating the Show Bread because people were starving. God honored him for placing compassion ahead of legislation. For those of us who honor the Messiah revealed in the Brit Chodeshah, New Covenant, we have the affirmation that Abraham and the fathers, who did not have the Torah or Brit Chodeshah, were still justified before God by their faith in the coming of Messiah, their heart felt prayer of Ani Maamin.
God is just, but also merciful. It is only when you willfully disregard his instruction and revelation that he punishes.
Hayah, Hu’, yihye: He was. He is. He shall be. Yawhah. The breath upon the water. Blessed be his name.