Scripture Daily

Context No. 714 of 4322 · Exodus

Context · Reflection

Exodus 12:15-20: in context

15“‘Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread; even the first day you shall put away yeast out of your houses, for whoever eats leavened bread from the first day until the seventh day, that soul shall be cut off from Israel. 16In the first day there shall be to you a holy convocation, and in the seventh day a holy convocation; no kind of work shall be done in them, except that which every man must eat, only that may be done by you. 17You shall observe the feast of unleavened bread; for in this same day I have brought your armies out of the land of Egypt. Therefore you shall observe this day throughout your generations by an ordinance forever. 18In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month at evening, you shall eat unleavened bread, until the twenty first day of the month at evening. 19There shall be no yeast found in your houses for seven days, for whoever eats that which is leavened, that soul shall be cut off from the congregation of Israel, whether he is a foreigner, or one who is born in the land. 20You shall eat nothing leavened. In all your habitations you shall eat unleavened bread.’”

On the night of the exodus, alongside the Passover lamb, God gives Israel a second observance to keep forever: seven days of unleavened bread. The command is thorough. From the first day you shall remove all yeast from your houses, and anyone who eats what is leavened during those seven days is to be cut off from Israel. No leaven is to be found in your homes at all, whether you are a foreigner or native-born. The reason is fixed to the date: on this very day I brought your armies out of Egypt.

At the surface it recalls the haste of that night, when there was no time to let bread rise. But the instruction dwells on the searching out of every last trace of leaven, and later readers heard more in it. Paul would take the yeast as a picture of the way a small corruption spreads through a whole batch, and tell his church to clean out the old leaven, because Christ our Passover has been sacrificed. What the feast asks is not that most of the leaven go, but that it all go, that the house be searched. And it ties that purge to freedom: the same day that made them free is the day they scour their homes. To be a delivered people is, in part, to get the old yeast out.

The feast of freedom required that every last trace of leaven be found and removed, not most of it. What small, spreading thing have I decided to tolerate, telling myself I have cleaned out enough?

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