Hebrew Voices #185 – A Biblical Understanding of Passover Leaven (Chametz)

Dr. Nehemia Gordon - Bible Scholar at NehemiasWall.com

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #185 - A Biblical Understanding of Passover Leaven (Chametz), Nehemia does a deep-dive into what exactly is or isn’t prohibited during the Feast of Unleavened Bread. He distinguishes the 3 Hebrew words all translated into English as “leaven”, describes how drastically different modern food production is from ancient times, and cuts through the controversy about alcohol.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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Hebrew Voices #185 – A Biblical Understanding of Passover Leaven (Chametz)

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

If you read it in the English, you wouldn’t get that. You wouldn’t know there’s a difference between leaven, and leaven, and leaven, that they’re three different things, seor, chametz and machmetzet.

Shalom everyone, this is Nehemia, and I’m going to be talking today about the question of leaven. What is leaven? In Hebrew, chametz. There was a talk about a similar topic last week, and there might be a certain amount of overlap.

One of the things we have to do here is go right back to the Hebrew and throw out the English, because in Hebrew there are three different words that are all translated in English as “leaven”. And so, we have to get heavy into the Hebrew here to understand what’s going on.

The first word is chametz. Chametz quite simply is “leavened bread.” It’s the opposite of matzah or matzot. Matzot is the Hebrew for “unleavened bread”. The holiday we’re going to have next week is called in English “the Feast of Unleavened Bread.” In Hebrew that’s the Feast of Matzot. So, matzot is simply the Hebrew word for unleavened bread and the opposite of matzot is chametz.

The second word is machmetzet, which actually only appears in two verses, and it means “that which is leavened”. And there’s a subtle difference between leavened bread and that which is leavened. We’ll talk about that later on.

And the third word is seor. In Hebrew it’s Sin-Alef-Resh, and seor is also always translated in the English as “leaven” but it’s actually quite different from chametz. Chametz refers to leavened bread and seor is actually what we would call today, “yeast”. And more specifically, it’s what they called in the ancient times, or what we call today, “sourdough starter” or “sourdough”.

Today we have sourdough bread, and what exactly is sourdough bread? The way they made any bread in ancient times was, they would take a piece of bread from the previous day’s bread and then they would stick that into the new dough. And that’s called a sourdough, or a sourdough starter, that little piece they would take from the previous day’s bread.

And why did they take a piece of bread from yesterday’s bread? Because the bread has sat for a certain number of hours, and it concentrates. And what they would do is… actually every day they would take dough from the previous day. And over time the yeast from the air goes into the bread and multiplies, or at the end of the day they would take dough and use it the next day. And they would do this every single day.

Yeast… there’s yeast in the air, of course, and then it rises. And if you want to make it rise quicker, you simply take a piece of dough that already has yeast in it and stick it in the new batch of dough. That’s how they would make bread rise. Today we buy a little packet of yeast, and we pour it into our dough. Or some flours today even have the yeast premixed, what they call self-rising dough. But in ancient times it was this sourdough. It’s called sourdough because it becomes soured after sitting out for a while, and it’s highly concentrated with yeast.

“For anyone who eats chametz from the first day through the seventh day, that soul shall be cut off from Israel.” So, here we have a direct commandment; we have to get rid of all the seor because we’re not allowed to eat chametz. When you read that in the English, you don’t see that. You see you have to get rid of all the leaven because you’re not allowed to eat leavened bread. So, that’s the word seor. So, there’s a big difference between seor and chametz. Seor is sourdough or yeast, and chametz is leavened bread, and you wouldn’t know that from reading the English.

So, let’s look at the first passage, the first time that the commandment concerning leavened bread actually appears in the Tanakh, and that’s in the Book of Exodus, chapter 12 verse 15. And there we read, “Seven days you shall eat matzot.” Matzot, remember we said, is unleavened bread. “Seven days shall you eat matzot; indeed, by the first day you shall completely remove,” or “cause to cease,” literally… if you don’t know how bread was made in ancient times, you might not understand the difference between leaven and leavened bread. Seor, what they’re translating as leaven, is again, this yeast or sourdough starter that is then put into the dough and causes it to rise quicker.

Now, one of the things that isn’t obvious, and you can only really know this through experience, is that really any dough will rise if given enough time. Any dough made from flour or made from a grain of flour. For example, if you take regular flour, and you mix it with water and you don’t add yeast, it will eventually rise, but it will actually take about two or three days. And the whole point of adding the yeast is to make it rise within about six hours. Today they have yeast that makes it rise much faster. But basically, you want it to rise in a relatively short amount of time.

So, here we have in this verse, Exodus 12:15, it tells us to “cause to cease”, it says, “all the seor.” And they sometimes translate that as “utterly remove”, and that’s a correct translation. But it literally means “to cause to cease;” the word there is tash’bitu. And the word tash’bitu is the verb form of Shabbat, Sabbath. Shabbat means “to cease from work”. Here the word is being used as “to cause it to cease from existence”, that is to completely cause to cease all the leaven that you have in your houses, to get rid of it completely. And again, the word here is seor. You get rid of the seor, the sourdough starter, and then you won’t have chametz, you won’t have leavened bread, because you won’t be able to make leavened bread. It will take three days for the bread to leaven instead of just six hours if you get rid of the yeast, the sourdough or sourdough starter.

We find three different types of commandments, or three different formulations in the Torah about leaven and leavened bread. It says in a number of different places, “it shall not be found”, “it shall not be seen”, and “it shall not be eaten”. Let’s take a look at these.

In Exodus 12:19-20, it says, “Seven days seor …” Remember, seor is their sourdough starter. “Seven days seor shall not be found in your houses. For anyone who eats machmetzet, that soul shall be cut from the congregation of Israel, whether from the sojourners or from the native born of the Land. You shall not eat any machmetzet in all your habitations. You shall eat matzot.”

Well, what is this machmetzet? Machmetzet, if you look in the Hebrew you’ll see, has the same root as the word chametz but it’s a different form. It’s actually a noun that’s derived from a Hiphil verb, and in this case, it has the meaning of “that which leavens”. Whereas chametz is leavened bread, machmetzet seems to be anything that leavens, not necessarily just bread. For example, beer. Beer is, well, in ancient times especially, beer was considered quite simply liquid bread. They would let bread sit for a very, very, very long time and eventually it would turn into beer. It didn’t taste quite like beer today, but basically beer is flavored liquid bread. And so, there’s an example of something which leavens but is not bread itself. The same thing with whiskey, by the way. Grain whiskey is, of course, also made from grains, and it actually goes through the same leavening process that bread goes through, it just goes through it much more intensively.

So, here we see that, “seor may not be found in our houses”. And why may it not be found in our houses? Because if you eat machmetzet, you’re going to be cut off from the congregation. And so, again we’re seeing “get rid of this yeast”, or sourdough starter, “which is used to make things that leaven” because you’re not allowed to eat leaven. So, there it says, “it shall not be found”.

And actually, because it says, “it shall not be found”, the rabbis have a custom of going out the day before Passover, going around your house, and doing what they call bedikat chametz, “a chametz examination”, and looking for it. And then they actually symbolically find a piece of chametz, and then they say, “We found all there is, and there’s nothing more to find.” Which isn’t actually what the verse is saying here. What the verse is saying here is, get rid of it so that it is not there. It doesn’t literally mean to look for it and then have it not found, but simply get rid of it.

The next verse we’re going to look at is Deuteronomy 16:4 and there it says, “Seor shall not be seen in all your borders for seven days.” So, here we see that the formulation of, “it shall not be found” and “it shall not be seen” is really the same thing. It’s quite simply expressing it in two different ways, “it shall not be found”, and “it shall not be seen.” It just won’t be there. Get rid of it. You shall not have any seor, that’s what it means. Get rid of the seor.

In Exodus 13:3 we see something slightly different. There we see, “And Moses said to the nation, ‘Remember this day in which you went out of Egypt from the house of slavery, for Yehovah brought you out from this with a mighty hand and therefore no chametz may be eaten.’” And here it’s interesting; it doesn’t say, “no chametz may be seen”, but it says, “no chametz may be eaten”. In another place we’ll see it says, “no chametz will be,” may be, “seen”.

But it’s interesting that it never says, “no seor may be eaten”, because you don’t eat seor. Seor is not food, it’s a dough that’s highly concentrated with yeast. And if you read it in English, you wouldn’t get that. You wouldn’t know there’s a difference between leaven, and leaven, and leaven, that they are three different things: seor, chametz, and machmetzet. And again, seor is this leavening agent, chametz is leavened bread itself, a loaf of bread, or a piece of bread, or a pita, and machmetzet is anything that’s leavened.

In Exodus 13:7, it’s a very interesting verse which in the English makes absolutely no sense. Let’s read it in English. In English it would say, “Unleavened bread must be eaten for seven days, and no leavened bread may be seen or may any leaven be seen in all of your borders.” It sounds repetitive, but in Hebrew it’s not repetitive. It says, “Matzot must be eaten for seven days and no chametz may be seen, nor may any seor be seen in any of your borders.” So, here we’re saying we have to get rid of all the chametz and all the seor. And remember, again, chametz is leavened bread and seor is the leavening agent. We have to get rid of all of those things. And let’s think on a practical level today. That means I cannot have a packet of yeast sitting on my shelf. I’ve got to get rid of even that, especially that.

Well, what is this chametz? What is this leavened bread? And for many years, I read the passage we’re about to read, and I didn’t understand it. And the reason I didn’t understand it is because there’s this thing which I call the “18-minute myth”. Every Jew is taught that dough begins to rise, it begins to leaven, after 18 minutes. And it’s stated as a scientific fact, but it’s simply not biblically correct. Let’s see how we know that.

In Exodus 12 it describes how the Israelites went out of Egypt. And remember, this begins in verse 33. This is late in Exodus 12, after we were already commanded not to have any seor. So, there’s no yeast or sourdough, no leavening agent, and this is what it tells us about the Israelites as they left Egypt.

“And Egypt pressed the nation to hurry, to send them away from the land, for they said, ‘We are all dying.’” This is during the plague of the firstborn, in every house somebody’s dying. “So, the nation took up their dough before it had risen,” and literally what it says is, “before it had become chametz.” “Their kneading troughs bound up in their dresses over their shoulders.” So, they had a little bowl that they would knead the dough in. They just stuck the dough in that bowl, and put it in their garment, wrapped it in the folds of their cloak.

“And the children of Israel traveled from Ramses to Sukkot, about six hundred thousand male foot soldiers besides the children. And also, a mixed multitude among them, and flocks and cattle, very much property. And they baked the dough which they brought out of Egypt as matzot cakes for it had not risen.” Again, in Hebrew it says, “For it had not become chametz.” “For they were driven out of Egypt, and they could not tarry, and they also had not made provisions for themselves.”

So, what happened here? What’s being described? All over Egypt people are dying, it almost seems randomly. In every house there’s a dead person. And the Egyptians are saying, “Get out of our country, now leave.” And so, the Israelites take this dough that they were going to make for themselves some kind of food. They knew they were leaving, and so they were going to make for themselves food for the way, but it didn’t have time to rise. They didn’t have this leavening agent because they got rid of all the seor. So, it would have taken a long time to rise, certainly more than 18 minutes, and they stuck this dough in the kneading troughs, these little bowls, and they stuck that over their shoulder and carried it with them. And either at Sukkot or on the way to Sukkot… that’s the first town they came to after they left Egypt proper, on the way to Sukkot or at Sukkot, they baked this dough that they had taken with them out of Egypt. That’s what it says. Let’s read that again.

Verse 39, “And they baked the dough which they brought out of Egypt as matzot cakes, for it had not risen, for they were driven out of Egypt, and they could not tarry.” They didn’t have time for it to rise because they were driven out of Egypt, and they also had not made provisions for themselves. So, why are they baking this unleavened dough, which is kind of like not something you normally would want to eat? Why are they forced to bake this on their way to Sukkot, or at Sukkot? Because they didn’t make provisions. That’s what they had, and this is very significant.

I read this for many years, and I said, “Wait a minute. It certainly took more than 18 minutes for them to get from Ramses to Sukkot.” And so, I never understood how it could be that the bread didn’t rise? It must have taken them at least a day. Today I know, because I’ve tried it, that it takes much more than a day, certainly much more than 18 minutes, and even more than a day, for bread to rise if it doesn’t have yeast in it.

And you can do a very simple experiment… well, now is not the time. After Chag HaMatzot, after the Feast of Unleavened Bread, I recommend that you try this, it’s a very easy experiment. I’m not a cook! I don’t normally cook; I know how to heat up things. But here, I left my normal practice and bought a bag of flour, and I made sure it wasn’t self-rising flour. I actually had whole wheat flour, just to make sure we’re close to the conditions of ancient times. I mixed it with room temperature water, and I put it out. You have to leave it out; if you put it in the fridge, it’ll never rise or it’ll take a very long time. I left it out because there’s yeast in the air, and it can collect yeast from the air or attract yeast, and I saw that after the first day nothing happened. After the second day, nothing happened. By the third day I started to see bubbles, and by the fourth day I saw that it was full of bubbles. Those bubbles are the leavening process beginning, or the outcome of the leavening process that produces gas, or one of the things it produces is gas.

So, what’s being described here in Exodus 12:33-39 is that the Israelites are leaving Egypt and they’re taking with them this dough out of Egypt. And probably a day or two later, when they get to Sukkot, or on their way to Sukkot, maybe that night, they bake it and make it as matzot.

So, very clearly it takes more than 18 minutes for something to leaven. And what we’re forbidden is to eat something that has actually gone through this leavening process where it’s producing these bubbles. Again, I want to emphasize, if you’re using self-rising flour, which is a very common thing today, it will completely rise in an hour and a half because it has baking soda in it which makes it rise even faster, and that’s leavened for sure. But if you take flour without any leavening agent, it will not rise after 18 minutes, it won’t even rise after a day. And that’s very significant for making matzot for ourselves, that there are simply no requirements to have it completely done within 18 minutes.

It’s actually very interesting, this 18-minute myth. I looked it up to see where it came from. The rabbis quote it from the Talmud, but the Talmud doesn’t actually say this. What the Talmud talks about is the time it takes for dough to rise for different people, and it says, “For the deaf man, the dough rises in the time that it takes him to walk a mile.” That’s what it says. It sounds ridiculous, the time it takes for a deaf man to walk a mile, that almost sounds like a joke of some type! But this is the type of thing the Talmud talks about, all kinds of different strange scenarios. And later, the rabbis looked at that and they said, “Well, it takes 18 minutes to walk a mile, and it must have said deaf man because you can’t ask him how long his dough has already been rising, and so, that’s the maximum amount of time.” They sort of just assume that’s what the Talmud means, even though it doesn’t actually say that in the Talmud. The Talmud is simply talking about a deaf man, and it actually talks about different types of dough rising. But in any event, that’s clearly not consistent with what it says in Exodus 12:33-39, because here we’re seeing it’s much longer than 18 minutes.

Alright, the next thing we’re going to look at is, we have three places where it talks about eating with chametz. In two places it says, “You must not slaughter with chametz,” and in the third place it talks about not eating with chametz. Remember, chametz is leavened bread. Let’s look at those passages.

The first one is in Exodus 23:18, and there it says, “You must not slaughter together with chametz the blood of my sacrifice. And you must not leave over until morning the chaylev.” Chaylev we talked about in our previous study. Chaylev is a certain type of fat; there’s a list in Leviticus 3. “You must not leave over until morning the chaylev fat of my festival offering until morning.” So, this is Exodus 23:18, and it’s not immediately clear what it’s talking about. It doesn’t mention anything here about Chag HaMatzot, about the Feast of Unleavened Bread, it says “feast” or “festival offering”, but it’s not immediately clear what it’s talking about here. “You must not slaughter together with chametz the blood of my sacrifice.” It’s just not clear. What sacrifice? And what does it mean “to slaughter together with chametz”?

Now, Exodus 23 is repeated, almost the entire passage, almost word for word. It’s paraphrased in Exodus 34. There’s this whole section of Exodus 22 which is then repeated in Exodus 34, and there, from this parallel, we can learn a lot about what Exodus 23 is talking about and vice versa.

So, in Exodus 34, when this verse is repeated, in verse 25, it says, “You must not slaughter together with chametz the blood of my sacrifice and you must not leave over until morning the Passover Festal sacrifice.” So, here we see that. And we could have guessed this actually from Exodus 23:18. But in Exodus 34:25 it’s explicit that this is talking about the Passover sacrifice. We could have guessed this, because in Exodus 23 it talks about not leaving over until morning, and we know that’s one of the rules of the Passover sacrifice, that nothing of the Passover sacrifice can be left over until morning. It’s eaten in the evening, and by morning it has to all be gone, and anything that isn’t eaten or burned has to then be burned. But in Exodus 34:25 it’s explicit and clear that this is talking about the Passover festal sacrifice.

It’s interesting, because in Hebrew it has the phrase “zevach chag hapasach”, which means “the sacrifice of the Passover Feast”. But this is not referring to the holiday of Passover. The holiday isn’t called Passover, it’s referring to the festal sacrifice. And we can confirm that by looking in Exodus 23, where it refers to the sacrifice as “chagi”, “my feast”, or “my festal sacrifice”. You might need to know a little bit more Hebrew to appreciate what I just said in that last part.

But in any event, it’s still not clear what it means “to slaughter together with chametz the blood of my sacrifice”. What does that mean? Does that mean I’m holding chametz in one hand, leavened bread, and the knife in the other, and I slaughter the animal? It’s just not clear.

In Deuteronomy 16 it clarifies that situation. In verse 2 it says, “And you must slaughter the Passover to Yehovah, your God, from the flock or from the cattle in the place where Yehovah shall choose to place His name.” That’s significant in itself because at the time of the Exodus they had to slaughter the animals in their houses. And that was something that was unique for Egypt, for the first Passover that took place in Egypt. In Deuteronomy 16, we’re told you have to do it at the place where Yehovah chooses to place His name, which of course is the chosen place, the Temple, or the Tabernacle before there was a Temple. And you can’t do it in your house anymore; that was only in Egypt.

And then it goes on in verse 3, and it says, “You must not eat it together with chametz. For seven days you will eat in addition to it matzot, the bread of poverty, for in haste you went out of the land of Egypt, in order that you remember the day of your going out of the land of Egypt all of the days of your life.”There’s a couple of important things here. First of all, it seems from this that eating it together with chametz, or slaughtering it together with chametz, it seems to mean while chametz is present. In other words, it seems to be saying in Exodus 23 and 34 that you cannot slaughter the Passover sacrifice while you have chametz present. You have to get rid of all the chametz, and only then may you slaughter the Passover sacrifice. And that’s what it means here in Deuteronomy 16:3 when it says, “You must not eat it together with chametz.” You can’t eat the Passover sacrifice while there’s chametz present.

And then it says an interesting thing; it says, “For seven days you will eat in addition to it matzot, the bread of poverty, for in haste you went out of the land of Egypt, in order that you remember the day of your going out of the land of Egypt all the days of your life.” So, why are we commanded to eat unleavened bread and not eat leavened bread? It says explicitly here in Deuteronomy 16:3, “So that you remember the Exodus from Egypt.” And that almost seems obvious, that’s almost like a truism, and we’ve already seen that in Exodus 13. We saw, “You may not eat chametz because Yehovah took us out of Egypt with a mighty hand,” Exodus 13:3. And here in Deuteronomy 16:3 it’s repeating that. The reason that we must eat unleavened bread, matzot, and that we can’t eat chametz, leavened bread, is to remember that Yehovah took us out of Egypt and to remember this incident where we didn’t have time to bake the bread, we didn’t have time to let it sit and rise because we went out in haste.

And why do I emphasize that? I mean, it’s obvious that we’re not supposed to eat leaven on Chag HaMatzot, The Feast of Unleavened Bread, because we went out of Egypt. I hear from a lot of people today, “Why are we supposed to eat matzot, unleavened bread? To indicate that we’re removing the leaven from our lives.” And I guess they mean by leaven, sin. But that’s not what it says in the Torah! The Torah tells you explicitly why you’re not supposed to eat… And it’s a very beautiful thing, I guess, to remove the leaven from your life, but it doesn’t say that in the Torah. The Torah tells you explicitly why we’re supposed to eat matzot and why we’re not supposed to eat chametz, because we went out in haste from Egypt. And this is a commemoration, a remembrance, that Yehovah took us out of Egypt. Which is, of course, the defining moment of the nation of Israel. Yehovah took us out of slavery, and by taking us out of slavery He made us His nation. He was our redeemer, our savior, and we became His people.

The next passage we’re going to look at is the laws of chametz, of leavened bread, as they relate to the flour offering, in Hebrew, the korban mincha. The laws of the flour offering are first given in Leviticus chapter 2, and there we read, in Leviticus 2:11, “Every flour offering that you offer to Yehovah you must not make as chametz, for you must not burn any seor or any honey as a fire offering to Yehovah.”

And again, in English you would have completely missed this because it would have said, “You must not make as leavened bread for you must not burn any leaven.” And you would think those are the same thing. But here we see we cannot take the flour that we offer to Yehovah and make it as chametz because we’re not allowed to burn seor or honey as a fire offering to Yehovah.

Okay, seor, we know, is put into the dough and makes it chametz. That is, you take the leavening or yeast agent, and you stick it into the dough, you mix it into the dough, and then from that you end up with chametz. What does honey have to do with it? What honey has to do with it is quite simply that honey is another thing that can act as a leavening agent. Honey is highly concentrated with sugar, and that will speed up the leavening process. And what I mean by that, again, is that if you leave out any dough that doesn’t have any leavening agent in it, it will eventually rise after three or four days. But if you stick honey in it, then it will leaven much quicker. It won’t leaven as quickly as if you stick seor, or sourdough, in it, but it will leaven so much quicker.

So, we’re forbidden here to burn seor and honey upon the altar of Yehovah, and therefore we cannot make the bread of the flour offering as chametz. I should point out that there are certain specific flour offerings that are brought as chametz, that are the exception to the rule. Those are the thanks offering and the new bread offering that’s brought on Shavuot, in the Feast of Weeks, but we won’t get into that, that’s a different conversation.

But the rule is, you’re not allowed to burn seor or honey upon the altar of Yehovah, and even in those other sacrifices, in the thanks offering that’s in Leviticus 7, where it talks about that you do make it as chametz, the flour offering. You don’t burn that on the altar, you just eat it as chametz.

From this point we’re going to skip over the rest of the topic of the flour offering, because that’s really a different subject that we can go into a different time. But this helps us in defining exactly what leaven is. We see it’s not just something that’s leavened using yeast, or using sourdough, it’s something that’s leavened using any leavening agent, even honey. And again, this doesn’t mean we have to get rid of all the honey in our houses because it doesn’t say that. It says to get rid of the seor, the sourdough, which is yeast, and to get rid of the chametz. We can have honey, but we just can’t mix the honey in with our dough.

One of the things we saw earlier was this word machmetzet. It appeared in Exodus 12, verses 19 to 20. It appeared twice, and that’s actually the only two places it appears in the Tanakh, twice in that verse, in Exodus 12:19-20. And machmetzet was significant because it means “that which leavened”, and not necessarily leavened bread. It can apply to whiskey, to beer. But this raises the question, what about other things that ferment, other things that go through a fermenting process maybe similar to the way that grains ferment as well?

And there’s a theory out there that anything that ferments cannot be eaten on Chag HaMatzot, the Feast of Unleavened Bread. And for example, some Karaites would say that you can’t drink wine on Chag HaMatzot because wine has gone through a fermentation process and therefore it’s also machmetzet. It’s not chametz, it’s machmetzet, “that which has leavened”. And really, this is a question we have to ask; does the term machmetzet, “that which leavens”, apply just to things made from grains? Or does it apply to anything that leavens?

Another example is, some Karaites won’t eat yogurt on Chag HaMatzot, on the Feast of Unleavened Bread, because they say that yogurt has also gone through a fermentation process. Well, let’s look at the biblical evidence and see what we can derive from this, if we can answer this question. Is it just grains, or is it anything that leavens?

And the first clue is with the Hebrew word for vinegar, and the Hebrew word for vinegar is, now, don’t get confused here, the Hebrew word for vinegar is chometz. Now we’ve been talking the entire time about chametz, but chometz is a different word. First of all, chometz has the accent, the emphasis, on the first syllable, whereas chametz has it on the second syllable. And in English, at least as I write it, chametz has an “A” and chometz has an “O”. Chametz, again, is leavened bread, chometz is obviously from the same root, but it’s a different word which means vinegar.

For example, we see this in Numbers chapter 6 verse 3, and here it’s talking about the nazir or what they call in English the Nazarite. Nazir is a person who makes a vow to separate himself from ritual impurity and from anything derived from the grape. He can’t even eat the seeds of grapes. And it lists the various things he can’t eat. It starts in Numbers 6:3 and it says, “He must separate himself from wine and intoxicant, he must not drink wine vinegar or intoxicant vinegar.” An intoxicant is simply very strong wine, “and he must not drink any soaked grapes and he must not eat any grapes or raisins.” And it goes on that he can’t even eat the seeds or the skin of the raisins.

So, here it’s significant for our question. We see that he can’t drink wine vinegar, and wine vinegar is chometz yayin, that is chometz made from wine, or intoxicant vinegar, which is chometz made from shekhar. And again, this is clearly related to the word chametz, there’s no doubt about that, they’re both from the root Chet-Mem-Tsadi. And the word chometz can mean the word vinegar even without the word wine or intoxicant next to it. It’s in many places in the Tanakh. I’ll just bring one which I think is a very interesting one.

Proverbs 10:26, it says, “like vinegar to the teeth and smoke to the eyes, so is the lazy person to those who send him”. I love that image, because you can just see the person who sent this guy out to do the work, and he’s sitting around being lazy not doing the work, and it burns his eyes and it’s annoying to his teeth. It’s a beautiful metaphor there, it’s a very powerful metaphor that you can almost feel. “Like vinegar to the teeth,” and the word there is chometz. It doesn’t have to have the word wine next to it, wine chometz, or wine vinegar; chometz by itself means vinegar.

What’s significant about this? Well, a number of things are significant. Let’s leave the question of vinegar aside for a moment. The fact that in Numbers 6:3 it talks about wine vinegar, wine chometz, let’s assume that vinegar itself is chametz for a moment. If vinegar itself was chametz because it’s called chometz, its name comes from a similar word, or from the same root, that would seem to imply that wine itself is not chametz, and let’s look at this a little bit closer.

The way that vinegar is made is that wine continues to ferment, and eventually it sort of spoils and becomes vinegar. And if it’s only called chometz once it’s gone past the process of wine, already into this vinegar fermentation, that would seem to imply that wine itself is not chametz, that it’s not leavened in a biblical sense. Because otherwise wine itself would be called chometz. The question is, though, is chometz itself? I mean, now we’ve looked at the question of wine, but what about chometz itself? Actually, let’s leave that to the end, the question of chometz itself.

There’s more evidence that wine itself is not considered leaven. We’ve just seen that there’s wine vinegar, which implies that wine itself is not chometz. Another piece of evidence is concerning the wine libations that are brought on Chag HaMatzot, the Feast of Unleavened Bread. We saw before that you can’t slaughter the Passover sacrifice while there’s any leaven present, and leaven can’t be brought upon the altar of Yehovah. But we know for a fact that wine was very often brought as a libation and poured out in the Temple. Libation means something you pour on the ground in the Temple.

In Leviticus 23:12-13 it talks about the day of the wave sheaf offering, which is the Sunday during the Feast of Unleavened Bread. And there it says, “And you shall offer on the day of the waving of the sheaf a whole yearling lamb as a burnt offering to Yehovah.” And of course, you can’t have a burnt offering without a flour offering that accompanies it, and a libation offering. And so, it explains what those are in verse 13. It says, “And its flour offering shall be two tenths of fine flour mixed in oil as a fire offering to Yehovah, sweet smelling. And its libation offering shall be one quarter a hin,” a hin is an ancient measurement, “one quarter a hin of wine.” So, we see very explicitly that they’re bringing wine as a libation offering in the Temple on Chag HaMatzot, on the Feast of Unleavened Bread.

And there’s another place where this is very clear as well, from Numbers 28. We won’t read the whole passage, but in Numbers 28 it talks about the libation offerings, or about the offerings that are brought in all the feasts, on all the appointed times, and specifically when it talks about the Feast of Unleavened Bread, we see there as well that there are wine libations that are brought on the Feast of Unleavened Bread.

And so, it’s very clear that if they’re bringing wine as an offering in the Temple on Chag HaMatzot, on the Feast of Unleavened Bread, on the Feast of Matzot, that wine could not possibly be considered chametz, or leavened, because you wouldn’t be bringing leaven into the Temple as an offering on the Feast of Unleavened Bread. It’s inconceivable.

And it’s very clear from the passages we read that the Passover sacrifice can’t be offered together with leaven, that you cannot offer these offerings on Chag HaMatzot together with leaven. It’s inconceivable. And I think we can conclude from that that wine itself is not leaven.

And this actually confirms what we saw earlier from Numbers 6, where it talks about vinegar as being chometz of wine and chometz of intoxicant, implying that wine and intoxicant themselves are not chametz. The question is, still, what about vinegar itself? Is vinegar chametz? The question here is, does the fact that the name of vinegar derives from the same root as the word for leaven mean that vinegar itself is leaven?

And here first, before we really examine this, we have to do what’s called Comparative Semitic Linguistics. And I won’t go into too much detail about this, but basically, in Hebrew, whenever you have a root that has the letter Chet in it and the letter Tsadi, either of those letters, you have to look in other Semitic languages to see what the value of that Chet is and what the value of that Tsadi is. And the reason for that is, in ancient Hebrew the letter Chet, the eighth letter of the alphabet, was sort of like a “C” in English. In English the letter “C” is sometimes pronounced as “K” and sometimes as “S”, it has a single symbol even though it represents two different sounds. And in ancient Hebrew, the Chet as well represented two different sounds, one was “Chet” and the other “Het”. And we can see which sound is intended by looking at other Semitic languages because they actually take two different letters for those two different sounds. Whereas in Hebrew it’s a single letter, just like “C”. It’s the same with the Tsadi, and there are actually several letters in Hebrew that represent more than one sound. And actually, in ancient Hebrew there were 29 different sounds even though there were 22 letters.

Well, when we compare this to other Semitic languages, we find that the word for leaven and the word for vinegar are actually the same root. And here, I have to emphasize the fact that they have the same three letters in Hebrew in their root doesn’t mean that they’re really the same root, without looking in other Semitic languages because of that Chet and Tsadi. But here we actually find that they are actually the same root. And in other Semitic languages we find that the meaning of this root is “sour”, that’s the base primary meaning of this root, something which sours.

And it seems to me that the reason that vinegar is called wine chometz, or wine vinegar, is that it’s soured wine in a very literal sense. That’s what it is. Bread which is leavened is… we even call it today in English, “sourdough”, because it has a sour taste to it. I don’t think that necessarily means, though, that anything that’s sour is chametz. Because what we see all the time is, “don’t eat chametz because you have to eat matzot”. And I think as a rule of thumb, anything you can’t make matzot out of cannot possibly produce leaven in a Torah sense.

In other words, if you can’t make matzot out of grapes, which obviously you can’t, then you cannot have leaven from grapes as well because chametz is the opposite of matzot. Chametz is leavened bread and matzot is unleavened bread.

So, it seems to me that chametz, and even machmetzet, that which is leavened, is very specific to things that are made from the grains. And that’s something that’s very easy to test. You take the flour, and you mix it with water, and you let it sit. And you’ll see after a number of days whether or not it’s leavened.

For example, if you take potato flour, potato starch, and you mix it with water and you let it sit… and I’ve tried this, that’s how I know, it will never leaven. It will eventually spoil after two or three days; it’ll start to stink. You’ll see mold forming. You won’t see bubbles bubbling up like you will with the flour made from one of the grains.

So, chametz is very specific to these five grains. The five grains, of course, are wheat, barley, rye, oats, and spelt. And you can see that if you take other flours that it won’t rise, it won’t leaven. It will just rot or mold.

So, that brings us to the conclusion of our topic or discussion of what is leaven. We’ve seen here that leaven is something made from one of the grains, a flour of the grain, that if baked without giving it a chance to rise will produce matzot. But if left for long enough will eventually rise, will go through a leavening process where it produces bubbles. And there’s a technical definition that I won’t get into. It also produces alcohol and other byproducts, even in bread, by the way.

And it’s very clear that this isn’t something that just takes 18 minutes, which is generally taught by the rabbis, or something that all Jews are just taught as a fact. It takes a lot longer than 18 minutes. We saw that when the Israelites left Egypt, they brought their dough with them and baked it on their way to Sukkot. And it was at least a day before they had a chance to do that. In any event, it was very clearly longer than 18 minutes. We saw that you have to completely get rid of all of your chametz.

One of the things they do in Israel today is they have a legal fiction, where they sell the chametz to a gentile. And what they do is there’s an Arab family that they say, “Okay, we’re going to sell you this for a certain amount, and we’ll buy it back from you just after Chag HaMatzot.” And that’s ridiculous. And then they just leave it in their houses and the Arab never picks it up. That’s ridiculous, because if the Arab showed up and said, “I want this chametz,” you wouldn’t give it to him. I mean, that’s a legal fiction, it’s a loophole they’re trying to jump through. And the truth is it says, “It shall not be seen,” and “It shall not be found,” and what that means is that it shall not be there. If I went to look for it, it wouldn’t be there.

We saw that chametz, that is, leavened bread, could be made as well using honey because that also serves as a leavening agent. And we saw that in Hebrew, vinegar is called chometz, or chometz yayin, soured wine, but that doesn’t necessarily imply that chometz, or vinegar itself, is chametz, leavened bread, it just simply has the meaning of soured. And we saw that wine, especially, is very clearly, even though wine is clearly going through a fermentation process, wine is not considered chametz in a biblical sense, because otherwise it wouldn’t be offered in the Temple on Chag HaMatzot, the Feast of Unleavened Bread.

“What about plain flour? Is plain flour a yeast?” And the answer is no, plain flour is not chametz. However, there is a type of flour they sell, which is called self-rising flour, in Hebrew they call it kemach le’afiah, or baking flour, and that actually contains a leavening agent in it. So, that’s not plain flour, although it may look like plain flour, so, you have to be careful there. That does contain seor in it.

Okay, I can’t think of a source off hand, the main source would be the Tanakh, of course. In this case, the way I found out about the sourdough was quite simply looking into the history of how bread was made, and I discovered that 200 years ago they didn’t simply take a packet of yeast and pour it into flour. They had sourdough, which, again, was this dough that was taken from a previous day’s leavening, and so it was highly concentrated with yeast, and they used that to infect the next day’s dough.

“You mentioned about the wine offered in the Temple,” not so’ar, it’s seor. So’ar means anything “Seor”. So, the wine offered in the Temple, the word is shekhar, simply means “intoxicant”, that which causes one to become drunk. And that’s strong wine, what we would call fortified wine, as opposed to wine that’s just been given a short amount of time to ferment and doesn’t have a high alcohol content, or maybe it has to do with the type of grapes. In any event, you really just need to look at the history of food production, which has drastically changed over the last 100 years.

You’re right, there’s a problem here, that the ancient Israelites weren’t sitting and reading the labels of the ingredients because they made everything themselves and it was much more simple. And if you got rid of the seor, the sourdough starter, then there wouldn’t be any leaven, because you’d have to go out of your way to make leavened bread. You’d have to let it sit for the first four days of Chag HaMatzot to produce leavened bread because you didn’t have the sourdough starter. So, you’re right, we live in a different culture and a different society today, where foods are produced in a much different way than they were in ancient times and it creates a lot of problems, there’s no question about that. But I think the basic principle is what we need to follow; that we have to not eat anything that’s leavened, any of the five grains that are leavened, or anything else that could leaven.

“What if the 15th of the first month,” this is the question, “What if the 15th of the first month happens to be a Shabbat? I mean about burning the rest of the Pesach offering in fire before the morrow.” “Bread yeast is a fungus species.” Yeah, you can look it up. There’s a lot of websites on the internet that explain what yeast is in technical terms, in a technical sense. It is a living organism, and it actually exists in the air, and it lives off of flour and reproduces. That’s why if you leave out the flour for three to four days, you’ll end up with it being highly concentrated with yeast from the air.

So, what about the fire? I’m not sure what the question is really about the Pesach offering and fire. We’re forbidden to kindle fire on Shabbat, but sacrifices in general are brought on Shabbat and there’s an eternal fire, so when it comes to sacrifices that’s sort of the exception to the rule as far as fire is concerned. So, it’s not a problem.

The question was, “Are eggs considered chametz, or leavened bread, or leaven in any sense?” No, they’re not. Eggs are not considered chametz. Eggs are probably used in a lot of Passover recipes because eggs will expand when you bake them, and it artificially creates something that looks similar, or maybe has a similar texture to leaven. But eggs themselves are not leaven.

Okay, I think they actually had warning, because in Exodus 12 they were given warning sometime before the 10th of the month that this would happen, that they would have to get rid of all the seor and not have chametz. But they were also told that they have to be ready to leave in haste. That they were to eat the Passover sacrifice “with their loins girded and their staff in their hand” because they were going to be sent out at any second. And I think that’s a major part of the message of Passover, Chag HaMatzot, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, that the redemption could come at any second, that Yehovah would cause it to happen very quickly after 430 years of slavery in Egypt. At a moment’s notice they would have to leave.

Ah, first of all, Yochanan mentions yeast in the air, which I see that I missed. I didn’t answer. I don’t think we’re responsible for things in the air. And again, when it says seor, in the ancient times what it was specifically referring to was the sourdough starter, which was flour that had concentrated amounts of yeast in it. It had attracted yeast over a number of days until it became concentrated.

Somebody asked about animal food. And I’ll get to Ivan’s question in a minute. I was jotting down the notes here. Animal food… and I have, of course, Georgia, who’s sitting right next to me, my little baby Georgia dog. Ironically, in Israel… well, not ironically. I think it’s almost ridiculous, but in Israel they sell kosher for Passover dog food. I kid you not! On Friday, I picked up a bag of Passover dog food. There is such a thing. I don’t know if it’s necessary. In other words, I think you can feed your dog leaven. If it’s dog food it’s not human food, and it’s not fit for human consumption. It’s not even kosher to begin with. It’s probably made from… I don’t even want to talk about what it’s made from. But Georgia has kosher for Passover dog food. I don’t think it’s necessary, though.

Yeast extract. Why did I write this? Ah, you asked about the soups that contain yeast extract. So, here we have… and again, you can research this and learn more about it, but you’ll find that there’s yeast made in two different ways today. There’s yeast that’s grown in a petri dish, because remember, yeast is a fungus. It’s a living organism, and you can actually grow it in a petri dish. And that itself I don’t think would be considered seor. You wouldn’t be able to put it in your flour because, like honey or baking soda, it would cause leavening. But that itself I don’t think would be considered seor. It wouldn’t be inherently forbidden on Chag HaMatzot.

However, most yeast that you buy today is actually a byproduct of beer and whiskey production. Remember, whiskey and beer are made from grains that are hyper fermented, and at the bottom of the barrel or the vat where they’re making this beer, there’s this sort of soup of hyper, hyper, hyper, super yeast-filled barley, and that’s what you buy in the store. They take that, they dry that out, they package it, and that’s usually what you buy in the stores as baker’s yeast. So that, obviously, would be no different than dough you let rise for 40 days. In other words, that is called brewer’s yeast, but it’s basically the yeast that you usually buy in the store. At least I know in Israel that’s the most common type they have and that itself is inherently seor and has to be removed on Chag HaMatzot.

“When they left Egypt with the dough, wouldn’t the seor have already been mixed with the dough, as that would have been mixed in already?” That’s a very good question. The answer is that earlier in Exodus 12, it told them to get rid of all the seor so there wouldn’t have been seor in their dough. I think what you’re pointing at is a very good point, that it wasn’t just an accident that they didn’t have leavened bread when they left Egypt. It wasn’t just a fluke. It was because they were commanded to get rid of the seor that the flour never rose. But then, if they had waited long enough, the flour would have risen anyway. So, there are two reasons why we have unleavened bread. The first is that we were commanded from the beginning, even before the Exodus, but also because we had to leave so suddenly. That even if we wanted to make leavened bread, we couldn’t.

Somebody’s asking about beer. Any alcoholic beverage made from grain is going to be chametz, and that means beer and it means whiskey. Both of which are made from grains. Somebody asked about rum. Honestly, I’m not exactly sure what rum is made from. I think it’s made from sugar or from molasses, in which case, I don’t think it would be… I mean, basically, you have to find out what these things are made from, and if they’re made from any grain then they’re going to be chametz.

I see we’re now down to the second round of questions. I don’t think it’s really relevant what they ate in ancient times. In ancient Israel they didn’t eat bananas, but bananas are not chametz. But they certainly didn’t eat the corn, which comes from the new world, but corn is not chametz. I think there’s something to what you’re saying, that if you make things yourself, then you’ll know what’s in it. But the fact that’s what was done in ancient times isn’t really the issue. The issue is that you’ve no way of knowing what a lot of things are, and so, yeah, if you make things yourself, you’ll be more on the safe side. But again, I don’t think it’s so much what they did in ancient times as being the issue.

“You said that vinegar, chometz yayin, and wine are not chametz, but could any of them be made machmetzet? Remember no chametz would be offered with the burnt offering, nothing is said in the Torah about machmetzet.” No, but the point is that during Chag HaMatzot you can’t be offering even machmetzet… you can’t have machmetzet even in existence, so how could you be offering wine in the Temple on Chag HaMatzot if you can’t have machmetzet? To me, that’s a decisive truth that wine itself is not machmetzet or chametz. As I mentioned before, there is a Karaite opinion that claims otherwise, and you can ask people who think that how they explain the fact that wine is offered in the Temple on Chag HaMatzot. I don’t see how you can get around that.

Okay, here I was PM’d a question, which is a good question. Somebody asked about non-alcoholic beer, does that contain leavening too? And non-alcoholic beer is quite simply beer that somehow… I’m not exactly sure how they do it, but in any event, it’s simply made from barley, and it’s fermented barley. So, yeah, even non-alcoholic beer is chametz as well. In ancient times, again, I know that in ancient Egypt, the ancient Egyptians first discovered beer, and they did that by letting their bread sit for too long. And they referred to it simply as liquid bread.

Okay, we’re going to make this the last round of questions. The last four questions. Somebody asked a good question here. “What are the five grains?” And you could look these up in an encyclopedia, and ultimately, the way to know is to take these flours and see if they rise, which I’ve done, and you can do very easily. They are wheat, barley, rye, spelt, and oats.

You’re typing your question, “What do you think Yehovah is trying to teach us about the Feast of Pesach, of Unleavened Bread? Why is He telling Israel to get rid of the leaven during this time?” Okay, that’s a very good question, and we saw the answer directly in Deuteronomy 16. It tells us exactly what the reason is. The reason for Chag HaMatzot, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, is to remind us that Yehovah took us out of Egypt, which is a pivotal event in the history of Israel. It’s the event that marks Yehovah redeeming the nation of Israel and taking us as His chosen nation. And that’s the significance of Chag HaMatzot. It tells you that right in the Torah so there’s no question about it. It has nothing to do with removing leaven from your life.

By the way, without getting too far… I’ll skip that, it doesn’t matter. Malachi, New York… Actually, before we go to Malachi, somebody PM’d me a question here which I think is very important. And they actually did this a while ago, so I should answer it. Somebody asked, “Are we supposed to slaughter a lamb or a goat for Passover today? Why? And why not?” And that’s a very good question. Today, are we supposed to bring the Passover sacrifice? And first of all, of course, we are supposed to, but can we do it under the current circumstances? I think it’s very clear that the answer is no.

First of all, you can only bring it in the chosen place, the place where Yehovah has chosen to place His name. We read that before in Deuteronomy 16, very clearly. And today, the place where Yehovah has chosen to place His name forever is Jerusalem. It tells you that in a number of places in the Tanakh, that Yehovah has chosen to place His name there forever. So, you can only bring it in Jerusalem at the place of the Temple. Today we physically can’t do it, because if you did you would be shot in the back. So, it’s impossible today to bring the Passover sacrifice, unfortunately. There are other reasons why we can’t as well, because of issues of ritual purity, but that’s a whole other topic. But even if those were solved, there’s the physical problem of actually getting to the chosen place where Yehovah has chosen to place His name and bring Him the sacrifice, so we physically can’t bring it today.

“Well, it says to follow what Yehovah’s commanded us in His word, and that means to be a Karaite.” Yeah, you’re absolutely right. “You talked about a whole bunch of things that are nonsense, and we don’t do things that are nonsense.” We do get together and tell over the story of the Exodus, because in Exodus 12 it talks about this evening as Leil Shimurim, “a night of watching”, or “a night of remembrance”. And in ancient times, what that meant was they’d slaughter the Passover sacrifice and sat there eating it all night. They had to finish it by the morning, and to eat a lamb in one night and to have it completely eaten by the morning meant they were sitting there eating all night and telling over the story of the Exodus at this “night of watching”, Leil Shimurim. So, today we don’t have the Passover sacrifice, but it’s still Leil Shimurim, it’s still a “night of watching” where we tell over the story.

Okay, so, you ask about the haggadah. Haggadah simply means “to tell over”. So, we do tell over, but we don’t tell over… if anybody has been to a Rabbinic Passover Seder, they know that the rabbis sit around telling stories about this rabbi and that rabbi, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Exodus. The Exodus is mentioned, but the main emphasis is about this rabbi and that rabbi, and we don’t tell those stories over, we just read directly from the Torah and from the Psalms about the Exodus from Egypt. Or tell over the story in your own words if you prefer. But we don’t tell over stories about dead rabbis, that doesn’t have anything to do with the Exodus.

To my knowledge, corn flour will not rise. It doesn’t leaven, as they say. I mean, if you stick baking soda into anything, it’ll appear to rise, but it doesn’t actually leaven. It won’t bubble up like wheat flour will. So, a tortilla wouldn’t be leavened bread, it would have to have been made from one of the five grains. If you want, there’s a very good recipe for matzot, for unleavened bread, on the Karaite Korner website, which isn’t the usual type of matzot that you buy in the store. It’s a special type… well, it’s not special, it’s just a different recipe. It’s a traditional way of making matzot; the Karaite Korner website.

Oh! I love chapati! I love Indian food in general! Actually, here in Jerusalem we’re doing a Passover Seder, telling over the story of the Exodus, and Melech ben Yacov, who’s been here a number of times giving teachings, he’s going to be cooking an authentic Indian meal, so I’m really looking forward to that. And it’ll probably take us all night to finish Melech’s meal. Anybody who’s been there knows what I’m talking about.

Okay, I think this is going to be the last question, Hortium. “What food should be used for the Seder of the first night of the first Chag HaMatzot? Is it only matzot and maror, which are mentioned in the Torah?” You can eat anything you want on the first night of Chag HaMatzot, but for all seven days you should be eating matzot. It says, “Seven days you will eat matzot.” You can also eat bitter herbs on the first evening as well, but you’re doing that as a commemoration of the Passover sacrifice, because originally that was meant as part of the Passover sacrifice. And you can do that as a commemoration, but it’s not actually the Passover. You have to bear in mind that you’re not actually doing the Passover sacrifice.

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VERSES MENTIONED
Exodus 12:15
Exodus 12:19-20
Deuteronomy 16:4
Exodus 13:3
Exodus 13:7
Exodus 12:33-39
Exodus 23:18
Exodus 34:25
Deuteronomy 16:2-3
Leviticus 2:11
Leviticus 7
Exodus 12:19-20
Numbers 6:3
Proverbs 10:26
Leviticus 23:12-13
Numbers 28

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OTHER LINKS
Traditional Karaite Matzah Recipe
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Passover and Leaven

The post Hebrew Voices #185 – A Biblical Understanding of Passover Leaven (Chametz) appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.