Baking bread, some insist, is the fief of masters. You have to follow the recipe with robotic accuracy, timing the yeast’s eructations with a stopwatch or the result will be embarrassing. YouTube debunks that fallacy and in fact bread and matza, really a flatbread, have been around for longer than civilization as we know it with nary a timer in sight.
Once the assumption was that the delight of dough only emerged with the advent of farming around 10,500 years ago. Researchers still argue which came first, beer or bread (or maybe wine), and whether the one or the other was responsible for the Neolithic Revolution. But the roots of processing grain and preparing it may lie much deeper.
Neanderthals in Iraq were collecting legumes and starches, soaking them, and “baking” the mush on the fire as much as 75,000 years ago. Perhaps that’s less proto-bread than pre-patties, but even so. Prehistoric modern humans in Greece were using a similar technique about 38,000 years ago. How either soaked grains or legumes before clay pots were invented remains a mystery. And in the Black Desert of Jordan, archaeologists found the earliest actual bread found to date: about 14,400 years old. It wasn’t like an artisan sourdough, more like a chapatti, but it counts and was prepared around 4,000 years before the advent of agriculture.
Grindstones on which grains might have been crushed into proto-flour have also been around for tens of thousands of years. Nor did preparing flatbread need an oven: to this day people mix flour and water and grill it on a hot surface of rock or metal, even repurposed tin roofing.
As for leavening, habitually leaving grain to soak will at some point lead to the invention of sourdough starter.
Leavened bread is thought to have arisen in the Levant together with the domestication of its ingredients, and that of the grape. Grapevine cultivation for consumption and wine is believed to have begun slightly before, or with, the domestication of grains. So what have we? Fermentation all over the place. Yeast for bread could have come from the oenological process.
So, flatbread has been with us for well over 14,400 years. By the time the ancient Egyptian civilization arose and supposedly enslaved the Hebrews, leavened bread and beer were staples. Both were buried with the dead among other grave goods, and are pictured on their tomb walls.
Which leads us to the narrative of the enslaved Israelites fleeing Egypt so hastily in the Exodus that they did not have time for their dough to rise, forcing them to bake it unleavened. And to this day we Jews eat of this flatbread during Passover week and eschew leavening (“chametz”).
Apropos unleavened, flatbread is that – flat – but today’s uniform matza thickness is an industrial artifact.
There is no prescribed thickness for matza. The Talmud records the argument over matza’s thickness between students of the rabbis Shammai and Hillel, including the point that matza is supposed to be a poor man’s bread (a literal translation of the Hebrew biblical text that has come to be translated as “bread of affliction,” Deuteronomy 16:3).
Thick bread, fluffily leavened or otherwise, does not smack of poverty. But what was the “matza” referred to in the Bible, anyway?
The bread of Babylon
“Observe the month of Abib, and keep the passover unto the Lord… Thou shalt eat no leavened bread with it; seven days shalt thou eat unleavened bread therewith, even the bread of affliction” – Deuteronomy 16:1-3
Many grouse that matza is truly a bread of affliction because it gives them gas and/or constipation. Others suffer no such side effects. If you’re the type who gets stomachache from matza, take care to stay hydrated and to eat plenty of fiber, otherwise known as veg and fruit, not OTC supplements. Take a walk.
It is hard to know when Passover arose, let alone the ritual consumption of matza. It seems Passover may have been created by King Josiah in the late First Temple period, as a “pact” between the Judahites and Yahweh for protection, symbolized by the ritual eating of a slaughtered goat. Meanwhile, a holiday celebrating matzot originated separately as an agricultural rite among Judahite exiles – probably based on a Babylonian custom that has long been forgotten.
Regarding ritual consumption of matza on Passover specifically, one might think that dates back to deep antiquity too, but strong evidence suggests that it only became a widespread practice during the Second Temple period.
The account of King Josiah’s Passover celebration in Jerusalem toward the end of the Kingdom of Judah, as recorded in II Kings 23:21-23, makes no reference to matza; nor does the description of the first Passover observed in the Second Temple in Ezra 6:19-21. The subsequent verse (6:22), which mentions unleavened bread, is clearly a later addition: the verse calls King Darius “King of Assyria” – a mistake that no person living in the Persian Empire would make.
We can deduce when the eating of matza was added to Passover from a remarkable letter discovered on the island of Elephantine in the Nile river. Known as the “Passover Letter,” it was written almost 2,500 years ago.
In 419 B.C.E., ancient Egypt was ruled by the Persians, and the Yahwistic Jewish soldiers stationed on Elephantine received a letter of instructions. The letter was written by a man named Hananyah. He instructs them to eat matza and avoid leavened food during the week after the Passover ceremony.
We can deduce from the fact that Hananyah had to spell this out to them that the weeklong Festival of Matzoth, which starts the day after Passover, was not widely practiced or known at the time. (Passover is one day; Matzoth is a week. They may be viewed as one holiday nowadays, but technically they’re two.)
While on Elephantine, we know that they celebrated Passover from another, earlier letter in which a guy writing his babysitter ends by asking when they were going to celebrate Passover.
We must therefore deduce that the practice didn’t originate in ancient Judah or Egypt, but rather in the Babylonian Exile. But can we find matza in that association? Well...
The Bible mentions matza time and again with no reference to Passover, as just an ordinary article of food. For example, Lot served matza to his guests (Genesis 19:3). What kind of food was this? Well, as said in Deuteronomy, it is called a poor man’s bread (lehem oni). Exodus informs us that it doesn’t rise (12:39) and from the fact that the festival of Passover takes place in the spring, we can probably suppose it is made with a grain that is harvested quite early.
All these indications lead to the theory that the matza referred to was barley bread.
Barley is harvested early compared with the other grains grown in the Ancient Near East in the spring. It has very little gluten and therefore barely rises. This in turn indicates that it was terrible bread, usually eaten by the very poor. People who make it today – and some do – tend to mitigate the leadenness by adding wheat flour.
Perhaps the best evidence actually comes to us from ancient Greek, which adopted a Semitic word akin to Hebrew matza as its word for barley bread: maza.
We also note that the Babylonians grew copious amounts of barley. This was not because they liked eating terrible bread but rather because they used it to make their favorite drink – beer.
Babylonian beer was made in a very different process from that used by modern brewers. First they made a very dry barley bread they called bappiru, which could be stored for extended periods. Once it was time to make beer, they would place these bappiru in water, mix in some date honey and let the concoction sit there and ferment.
Assuming that the practice of eating matza on Passover did appear during the Babylonian Exile, it may very well be that the earliest matzot were actually bappiru used in the making of beer. That probably didn’t sit well in the stomach either.
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April 09, 2023 at 01:42PM
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The Origin of Matza in 'Terrible Bread' - Archaeology - Haaretz
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