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When it comes to the bread, my plain understanding of the Exodus is that the Israelites left Egypt with dough (Exodus 12:34) and later baked it into unleavened bread because it had not risen (Exodu...
#1: Initial revision
by
Monica Cellio
·
2021-04-05T02:59:30Z (about 3 years ago)
Why didn't the dough rise during the night of the Exodus?
When it comes to the bread, my plain understanding of the Exodus is that the Israelites left Egypt with dough (Exodus 12:34) and later baked it into unleavened bread because it had not risen (Exodus 12:39). That's what I've always understood, from the torah and from the *haggadah*: the dough did not rise even though some hours passed between when they kneaded it and when they baked it. Over the last year I've learned to bake bread (I mean without using a bread machine). I've learned that dough, after kneading, left overnight rises, and that if you deflate it and shape it, it rises again, and then when you put it in the oven it rises some more. I'm not using commercial yeast but a sourdough starter, which has its roots in wild yeast. But that's modern, so I tried to learn about how bread was made in ancient Egypt. I found [this article describing a reconstruction of the process](http://www.historicalcookingproject.com/2014/12/guest-post-ancient-egyptian-bread-by.html) and, sure enough, the photos there are not of large fluffy loaves that we sometimes see today. (This diminished rise appears to be due to differences in the flour, both type and fineness of milling.) But it's not flatbread either; the dough, starting with wild yeast, did rise noticeably in the process. (My early loaves looked kind of like that, before I got past some beginner mistakes.) I'm not an expert in either torah or baking. I'm trying to reconcile what the torah tells us with what I've learned empirically. What made the difference? Why was the Israelites' bread unleavened when they started with a dough that, I infer, they would have expected to rise under normal conditions? Did the fact that they *moved* the dough (hastily and under pressure) make a difference? Was their breadmaking process different from what I understand and they would have needed to do something to cause it to be leavened, a step that they missed because they were fleeing? (In particular, they probably didn't bake this bread in an oven, given that they were on the move, but how did they bake it?) Did they do something to *prevent* it from rising? Do any of our sources comment on this?