How did the ancient Israelites get their bread to rise? After all, they couldn’t just run out to the grocery store and buy a packet of yeast.
That was the question I posed to Dr. Cynthia Shafer-Elliott a little over a year ago. She’s an archaeologist among whose specialties is diet and food preparation.
It turns out that they got their yeast from the air around them. They were sourdough bakers.
I am too.
The thing about using sourdough starter is that it takes time. With commercial yeast, dough needs to rise for a total of about two hours. With starter, dough frequently needs to rise overnight or even longer.
So now the association of unleavened bread with the Exodus from Egypt makes a lot more sense. They had to leave in a hurry and they couldn’t let the dough rise quietly for hours and hours.
Although there’s no evidence that the Exodus happened as described in the Bible, it seems that small groups of prisoners or laborers did escape from Egypt from time to time. If any of these escapes took advantage of sudden opportunities, then surely they would not have had time to let their dough rise.
Our world today is vastly removed from that of ancient Israel. However, if you bake with sourdough you have a remarkable connection to those people and their lives.
You may even come to understand the Bible in a new way.