Material. The best bread was made of wheat, called "flour" or "meal" (Judg 6:19; 1 Sam 1:24; 1 Kings 4:22; etc.) and, when sifted, "fine flour" (Gen 18:6; Lev 2:1). A coarser bread was made of barley (Judg 7:13; John 6:9-13). Millet, spelt, beans, and lentils were also used (Ezek 4:9-12).
Preparation. To make "leavened bread" (Heb. hames, "sour") the flour was mixed with water, kneaded on a small kneading trough, with leaven added. These kneading troughs may have been mere pieces of leather, such as are now used by the Arabs, although the expression "bound up in the clothes" (Ex 12:34) favors the idea of a wooden bowl. The leavened dough was allowed time to rise (Matt 13:33; Luke 13:21), sometimes a whole night (Hos 7:6, "their baker sleepeth all the night," KJV). When the time for making bread was short the leaven was omitted, and unleavened cakes were baked, as is customary among the Arabs (Gen 18:6; 19:3; Ex 12:39; 1 Sam 28:24). Such cakes were called in Heb. massa, "sweetness."

Thin, round cakes made of unleavened dough were baked on heated sand or flat stones (1 Kings 19:6), by hot ashes or coals put on them-"ash-cakes." Such cakes are still the common bread of the Bedouin and poorer orientals. The outside is, of course, black as coal, but tastes good.

Old bread is described in Josh 9:5,12, as "crumbled" (Heb. niqqud, a "crumb"; KJV and NIV, "mouldy"), a term also applied to a sort of easily crumbled biscuit (KJV, "cracknels").

"From flour there were besides many kinds of confectionery made: (a) Oven-baked, sometimes perforated cakes kneaded with oil, sometimes thin, flat cakes only smeared with oil; (b) pancakes made of flour and oil, and sometimes baked in the pan, sometimes boiled in the skillet in oil, which were also presented as meat offerings; (c) honey cakes (Ex 16:31), raisin or grape cakes (Hos 3:1; Song 2:5; 2 Sam 6:19; 1 Chron 16:3), and heart cakes, kneaded from dough, sodden in the pan and turned out soft, a kind of pudding (2 Sam 13:6-9). . . . The various kinds of baked delicacies and cakes had, no doubt, become known to the Israelites in Egypt, where baking was carried to great perfection" (Keil, Arch., 2:126).

Baking. When the dough was ready for baking it was divided into round cakes (literally, "circles of bread," Ex 29:23; Judg 8:5; 1 Sam 10:3; etc.), not unlike flat stones in shape and appearance (Matt 7:9; cf. 4:3), about a span in diameter and a finger's breadth in thickness. The baking was generally done by the wife (Gen 18:6), daughter (2 Sam 13:8), or a female servant (1 Sam 8:13). As a trade, baking was carried on by men (Hos 7:4-6), often congregating, according to Eastern custom, in one quarter (Neh 3:11; 12:38, "Tower of Furnaces"; Jer 37:21, "bakers' street").

Egyptian Bread-making. The following account of early bread-making is interesting: "She spread some handfuls of grain upon an oblong slab of stone, slightly hollowed on its upper surface, and proceeded to crush them with a smaller stone like a painter's muller, which she moistened from time to time. For an hour and more she labored with her arms, shoulders, loins, in fact, all her body; but an indifferent result followed from such great exertion. The flour, made to undergo several grindings in this rustic mortar, was coarse, uneven, mixed with bran or whole grains, which had escaped the pestle, and contaminated with dust and abraded particles of the stone. She kneaded it with a little water, blended with it, as a sort of yeast, a piece of stale dough of the day before, and made from the mass round cakes, about half an inch thick and some four inches in diameter, which she placed upon a flat flint, covering them with hot ashes. The bread, imperfectly raised, often badly cooked, borrowed, from the organic fuel under which it was buried, a special odor, and a taste to which strangers did not sufficiently accustom themselves. The impurities which it contained were sufficient in the long run to ruin the strongest teeth. Eating it was an action of grinding rather than chewing, and old men were not infrequently met with whose teeth had gradually been worn away to the level of the gums, like those of an aged ass or ox" (Maspero, Dawn of Civ., p. 320).

Figurative. The thin cakes already described were not cut but broken, hence the expression usual in Scripture of "breaking bread" to signify taking a meal (Lam 4:4; Matt 14:19; 15:36).
From our Lord's breaking bread at the institution of the Eucharist, the expression "breaking of" or "to break bread," in the NT is used for the Lord's Supper (Matt 26:26) and for the agape, or love, feast (Acts 2:46).

"Bread of privation" (lit., "penury") signifies to put one on the low rations of a siege or imprisonment (1 Kings 22:27; Isa 30:20).

"Bread of painful labors" (Ps 127:2) means food obtained by toil.

"Bread of tears" (Ps 80:5) probably signifies a condition of great sorrow.

"Bread of wickedness" (Prov 4:17) and "bread obtained by falsehood" (Prov 20:17) denote not only living or estate obtained by fraud but that to do evil is as much the portion of the wicked as to eat his bread.

"Cast your bread on the surface of the waters" (Eccl 11:1) is doubtless an allusion to the custom of sowing seed by casting it from boats into the overflowing waters of the Nile or in any marshy ground. From v. 1 it is evident that charity is implied, and that, while seemingly hopeless, it shall prove at last not to have been thrown away (Isa 32:20).

"Bread of Life" prefigures Christ as the supplier of true spiritual nourishment (John 6:48-51). He is the bread of heaven, and God's Word, like bread, is the spiritual staff of life (Matt 4:4).
(From The New Unger's Bible Dictionary)

 

back to food index        (Disclaimer)  (Medical disclaimer)