"Every grain offering you bring to the LORD must be made without yeast, for you are not to burn any yeast or honey in an offering made to the LORD by fire." Lev.2:11


It is thought that the reason yeast and honey were forbidden in this offering was that they both ferment under certain conditions. Thus, honey may have been associated with corruption.

Because yeast (leaven) also permeates, it is used almost without exception to symbolize the insidious spread of evil (sin).

In Mark 8:15, Jesus told his disciples: "And he charged them, saying, Take heed, beware of the leaven (yeast, NIV) of the Pharisees, and of the leaven (yeast, NIV) of Herod."

Dear Gail,

What you actually have here is another expression of the outworkings of Jewish concerns with ritual purity - a subject, by the way, that has come up more than once on various threads here at Club Adventist.

It reminds me of a personal inquiry I made into the subject last year. In this case, I was wondering about Jewish ritual bathing. I wrote to one of the professors in the Religion Department at the University of North Caroline - Chapel Hill, seeking more information:

As an American, a daily shower or bath is a given, at least, if the media, my family and friends, and those I know are any guide. By all indications, the Jews were apparently nigh frantic, so to speak, about ritual purity by the time of Jesus. One would think this would include daily bathing in particular, yet I've never come across much historically or biblically about such a thing, other than the Essene font in Qumran, which seems to be noted as an exception, not a rule.

So my question is this: Why is it that the Romans were the ones renowned for their plumbing and use of it, and not the Jews? I would have thought it would be exactly the other way around. Has this question ever been a subject of scholarly inquiry?

Dr. Magness, who is also an archaeologist of 2nd Temple Palestine, sent me this reply:

Jewish ritual bathing has nothing to do with hygiene. To the contrary, since ritual baths cannot be filled mechanically and cannot have a drain, the water would become quite filthy from repeated immersions over the course of the year (most ritual baths in ancient Israel were filled during the winter season by rain and then not filled again over the rest of the year, when it was the dry season). So, in fact ritual baths spread disease. Most if not all ancient Jews, not just the Qumran sect - observed the laws of Jewish ritual purity to some degree - its just that the Qumran sect took it to an extreme.

If you are interested in further reading I refer you to my book, The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Eerdmans, 2002), available in paperback (you can order it through amazon.com). It has a chapter on the ritual baths at Qumran that includes a discussion of ritual purity in Judaism.

So yes, the Romans really were cleaner.

Best wishes,
Jodi Magness

When I read things like this, it makes me wonder about modern assumptions, such as, "the reason for kosher food laws as prescribed in Leviticus, etc., was for purity (freedom from germs) and health concerns."

To our "modern" minds, we think it just stands to reason that God said those things because he wanted mankind to avoid eating scavengers and disease carriers. And while I'm not inclined to dispute that some food sources are more problematic that others, I do wonder who said what. Granted, it's not altogether unreasonable to accept that the hand of God may well have written the Ten Commandments. But I have some problems with assuming that, by extention, a similar word-by-word dictation applies to the rest of the Torah. More than that, overall, the paradigm doesn't fit.

When I run into things like this, it doesn't appear to me that that the modern mind and the ancient mind are working with the same set of a priori considerations.

Regards,
Norm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mead
"yeast employed during fermentation"

I wonder if you can ferment it without yeast...

It is amazing how little the average person knows about the life their great-grandparents lived. We invent in our heads these pictures of how life was, based largely on Walt Disney and Uncle Arthur - neither of whom cared one whit for historical accuracy...

One of the biggest pieces of evidence, to my mind, that EGW was not seeing real 'video' in her visions and dreams is how 19th C her descriptions of life in Israel and in Heaven are. All that may mean is God was showing her motivational and educational visual aids, it does not say anything about the origins of the visions.

You would think that unsanitary smelly ritual baths would at least warrant a remark...

/Bevin