What’s The Significance Of Yeast In The Bible?

What's The Significance Of Yeast In The Bible? Sometimes the Bible uses yeast for exactly what it is. It makes baked goods, like bread, rise. But sometimes we read about old yeast. There are implications of good yeast and bad yeast, But what if you don't really know much, if anything, about yeast?

Yeast was something very common to most people in Biblical times. It seems so common when reading the Bible that it feels like everyone pretty much knew how to make bead.

As such, they also had to know something about yeast.

When to use it. When to not use it. What happens when it's not used properly. How to mix it with different grains. And on and on.

But today? Lots of people know how to go to the store and buy bread. Or crackers, which have some of the same ingredients, but no yeast.

Some of you will at look the image and think not of a loaf of bread, but of the oven in your favorite pizza parlor. By the way, your pizza crust has varying amounts of yeast, depending on how thin or thick you like it.

It turns out, like many things in the Bible, we use similar things. Like bread. Like homes. Fish. Various red meats. And yet, we don't know much about how to make those things, process them, Etc. Some of the things Jesus, and others, used to describe things in the Bible aren't as familiar to us as they were to the people at that time.

All the examples above were used in the Bible. But most of us don't build homes, raise our own cattle, catch our own fish, bake our own bread, Etc. Those of us who are, let's say, more "wise" from our years of experience, have done those things in the past. Some of us who live/lived out in the boonies also did many of them either out of necessity or because it was just more common in those places.

I've had experience, to one degree or another, will all of them. But many haven't. So let's take a look at the bread/yeast thing today.

I do like to bake bread. I wish I was better at it, especially with whole grain varieties. If you want to have a go at it, Irish soda bread is a good starting point. The smell of fresh bread is just awesome. Add some butter as soon as it's cool enough to eat, and the taste is like nothing you've ever bought in a store.

Let's take a look at each of them to understand the role of the yeast in the analogies.

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Bread without yeast in the Bible: unleavened bread, matsah, matzah

Let's look at a passage first, then get into why this is so fascinating. It's a familiar passage, for both Jews and Christians. For Jews, it's about the Passover, when God freed His people from slavery under Pharoah. For Christians, this is the celebration that Jesus celebrated just before His capture and death. It's also the time He used to introduce our sacrament of Communion.

I underlined all the references to yeast/unleavened bread below.

The Passover - Exodus

12:14-20 pp — Lev 23:4-8; Nu 28:16-25; Dt 16:1-8