What was bread made of in jesus time

Archaeology helps us physically connect to the past, and, in this instance, in some small way, it helped connect us to the food of the ancient Israelites. Cynthia Shafer-Elliott, Ph. Shafer-Elliott has been part of several archaeological excavations in Israel and is currently serving on the staff of the Tell Halif excavations.

She is interested in the daily lives of the average Israelite and Judahite household, including economics, food preparation and consumption, religion and the roles and relationships of the family.

A special thanks to Tim Frank for guiding us through this project. Fruit in the Bible. The 10 Strangest Foods in the Bible.

A Feast for the Senses … and the Soul. Making Sense of Kosher Laws. I saw bread they called it shao bing made in an oven this way when i worked in China. Just like in the article, the dough was stuck on the inside wall of the oven.

Wow, amazing weblog layout! How lengthy have you ever been running a blog for? The entire look of your web site is fantastic, as well as the content material!

A tel is a hill or mound. Tel stems from Arabic, and is a noun. Two completely different things. Please try to be clear.

Language is a wonderful thing when used correctly. This type of oven is still being used in the rural areas of the country of Georgia. I personally watched bread being baked this way in Since the Georgian word for bread is puri, I suspect MMike is correct that this system of bread baking originated in India and spread to the Middle East and the Caucasus region.

A very enjoyable read. I love reading my Bible and seeing the practical side of it is very enlightening. Leviticus says the loaves for the tent tabernacle took four quarts of flour each NLT. How did hey makeandbake a loaf this big. Since India has an ancient culture, it probably originated from there and traveled to the Middle East.

If you know what they eat will you masses age to me on Facebook. Wonder which tribes took it there!! Thanks everyone for the comments! Thank you so much for posting this article on how tannurs were used in ancient times! It is much larger that the oven that you made and there is a bottom above the fire area that foods are cooked on. I do love cooking on wood cook stoves also. I have 2 but need to figure out how to put them up in my house.

Cynthia if you could contact me I would appreciate it. Thank you for your help in advance. In modern times, Jehovah has never left his people without clear guidance. Just as he did not expect the Israelites to scout out their own route, we today are not asked to find the way into the promised new world on our own. Jesus Christ is the assigned Leader of the congregation.

That slave class, in turn, appoints overseers in the Christian congregation. How can we be sure of the identity of that faithful slave, or steward, class? Happy is that slave, if his master on arriving finds him doing so! An interesting experiment. Why did they use sugar in place of honey, when honey was not used either — honeybees were not domesticated in ancient Israel, and only wild honey might have been available, but probably not often enough for common use.

A sweetener is needed for starting the yeast process or you end up with flat unleavened bread. Could other fruits have provided the sugar needed? Bread does take a high heat, and with fuel scarce or time-consuming to obtain, no doubt many turned to communal baking to share the heat, or to buying bread, and conserving time, and fuel to cook the rest of the meal at home.

Daily Grinding and Baking in Bible. TimesGrinding the flour. Women usually prepared their flour by hand, one of their chores performed early in the day. Proverbs ; Matthew In patriarchal times, the wheat that people commonly grew was emmer wheat, which produced grains that did not easily separate from the chaff. That made the work difficult, requiring pounding in a mortar or grinding in a hand mill. First, the wheat had to be moistened, pounded, and dried in the sun. Then, it was sifted to separate the grain before the milling could begin.

Jeremiah Larger millstones turned by animals also came into use when the job was done by a miller rather than the housewife. Baking the bread. Baking was the next stage of the daily routine. The housewife would mix the flour with water, knead the dough, and then bake the bread.

Genesis Some householders simply baked the bread on hot stones; others used small ovens. Leviticus ; Isaiah Prominent people, such as the Pharaohs, counted on professional bakers to prepare their bread, but in later years even the common people purchased bread. This type of oven known as tandoor is very commonly used in various parts of India to make different types of bread. You can also prepare chicken in that and it is very tasty and healthy.

So anyway, I am really looking to bake for them a bread that is as historically and anthropologically close to the bread that Jesus would have served at the last super.

Even if you are not a Christian, or find that whole story ridiculous, I am looking for bread that would have been in that part of the world at that time. I know that Durum wheat was domesticated before the soft, red, spring, and winter wheat that we use in modern flours. Anyone got any tips? These people are the Doctors and Judges of the town, and they will know B. I have to say that your question really intrigued me. The last supper was a Passover sedar.

The bread that would have been served was matzoh. This is unleavened bread, symbolizing the bread eaten by the Jewish people as they fled Egypt. They were in such a hurry, they did not have time for bread to rise. Thus, Matzoh is served at sedars to commemorate the flight from Egypt. Recipes should be readily available. Although it was the last supper that Jesus partook of with his disciples, it wasn't the Passover feast, I believe.

It's leavened bread. Definitely need to leave out white flour. Sometimes in the scriptures, barley bread was used to represent tough and courageous events, like with Elijah and Gideon. I wouldn't be surprised if the last supper bread had barley flour, after all, Jesus was about to allow himself to be tortured and murdered.

Spelt flour was also used in biblical times. Kamut and emmer were used in ancient Egyptian baking so it would be a fair bet that they also were used in Israel - especially after Moses. According to Wikepedia, wild emmer has been found at archeological sites in Israel dating back to 17, BC and domesticated emmer dating back to BC.

Spelt may also have been used - so one of these would be hard to disprove as having some authenticity! There is a wealth of material about the history of Jewish cooking so it should be possible to find out quite a bit about it. Is Matzo supposed to be soft and moist like pita but without the leavened hole s in the crumb? Or is it crisp like a cracker? Forgive me my ignorance. I was raised in south Georgia, my aunt was the only jewish person I ever met until I was 25 years old.

And she made the best ham and cheese sahdwiches ever, if you catch my drift. Maybe that is why in the Bible Mark says: "While they were eating, He took some bread, and after a blessing He broke it, and gave it to them, and said I looked at 13 different English translations of the original text, and every one of them uses the verb "break" when refering to the bread.

So, I guess I am pretty sure that the bread was crisp, as Matzo would be. My last issue is more to do with the grain used.

According to jewish dietary traditions of today, Matzo has to be made from one of the following grains: barley, oats, rye, spelt, or wheat. Fact check anyone??? I think Durum Wheat may have been around during this time? My brain is melting! I can't say what might have been meant by that passage, but "broken meats" were just bits carved from a whole roasted joint or whatever. The servants traditionally got to eat the broken meats after the lord of the manor and his guests were done eating what they wanted.

I was trying the whole time, when I made my last reply to think of Kamut. I agree with Andrew, I have read many times that Kamut was a grain going back to bibilical times in Egypt. But I also am convinced that there is barley involved too.

And they did use spelt also, ever hear of Ezekiel bread? If you want I also have access to some really good information that talks about what "breaking of bread" meant in the past, with different scriptural examples, as well as, what it means in some parts of the world today.

It's only a page long. You could read it to those people the night that you present your bread. Just a thought. It says that kamut is thought to be the ancient form of today's durum and also has origins of other grains. Bread is thought to be date to around 10, BCE, and there is some debate as to whether a taste for bread or ale caused people to give up their nomadic ways and begin an agricultural life style.

Wheat was bred into forms we'd recognize today according to Wikipedia around 5, years ago, and was widespread at that time. The Biblical references to separatating the wheat from the chaff suggests that modern wheat was not only known, but common by that time. Earlier wheats could not be separated so easily. Leavened bread is thought to date back to around 4, to 3, BCE, with pita and focaccia style breads being the ones thought to be among the first raised breads.

Ed Wood in his "World Sourdoughs From Antiquity" book recounts the project he worked on with National Geographic to reproduce the bread making technology in use in the time when the pyramids were being built. They used drawings on the walls of the pyramids which showed bread making in some detail as their guide. In the end, they produced breads that would be recognized today as leavened, sourdough breads.

You have lots of choices. The term "breaking bread" can refer to any bread. Bread made from wheat certainly, although Jewish law also permitted barley, oats, rye and spelt.

Wine and water was a staple of the period, and wine is explicitly mentioned along with bread at the Last Supper. The Hebrew word for wine is yayin, which comes from the word for ferment, and the New Testament Greek word is oinos, which is rendered into Latin as vinum. I may be stepping into controversy by noting that these terms refer explicitly to fermented grape matter. One scholar has suggested that the average man drank about a litre of wine in the course of a day in the Middle East, but the New Testament several times warns against drinking too much.

Jesus also ate fish. In one of his resurrection appearances to the disciples, he is described eating fish to show that he was real and not a ghost. A variant text, which does not appear in the Bible, says that Jesus bit into a honeycomb and the disciples examined the teeth marks to ascertain that he was no spirit. Jesus ate figs, which we know from the fact that on his way to Jerusalem, he reached for a fig tree but it was not the season for figs. We can also be reasonably sure that Jesus observed the dietary laws of ancient Israel, and so we know what he would not have eaten, such as pork, shellfish, reptiles or carrion-eating animals.

We can also rule out foods that had yet to be introduced to the Middle East, such as tea, coffee or sugars derived from sugar beets or cane. Anything indigenous to the New World would have been impossible for Jesus to eat, such as maize corn, pumpkins, peppers, tomatoes, potatoes or chocolate.