what is leavened: bread or dough that has fermented and risen, rather than the starter that raises it
Leavened bread was simply everyday bread. A household kept back a lump of fermented dough as a starter (שְׂאֹר), worked it into the next batch, and the new dough soured slightly, rose, and baked light and open. This word names the result of that process, the risen bread or dough, and not the starter that caused it. Nothing about it is sinister: it is what people ate on an ordinary day.
Almost every time the word appears, it is being regulated. The laws place risen bread in three settings:
- through Passover and the week that follows it may not be eaten, or even be found in the house, because Israel left Egypt too fast for dough to rise and eats flat bread (מַצָּה) instead
- nothing leavened may be baked into a grain offering or burned on the altar, and no sacrificial blood may be presented along with it
- leavened loaves are nevertheless brought to the sanctuary as gifts, with a thanksgiving sacrifice and at the wheat harvest, and there the priests eat them
Read together, those rules are not a verdict on bread. Risen bread belongs to ordinary life, and ordinary life stops at the edge of the altar fire: what goes into the fire has to be stable and unspoiling, which is why honey is barred alongside leaven and salt is required. The one prophet to use the word plays on exactly that line. Amos tells the worshipers at Bethel to go ahead and burn the leavened bread of a thanksgiving offering, mocking a shrine so pleased with itself that it would break the very rule it claims to keep.
Nuances
Disputed
Why leavened bread is barred from the altar fire in the priestly legislation.
- majorityFermentation was understood as a form of decay, and the altar is the place of life and stable holiness, so leaven and honey alike, both of which ferment and spoil, are excluded from what is burned.; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16, Anchor Bible 3 (Doubleday, 1991), 188-91
- minorityThe exclusion is the counterpart of the salt required in Leviticus 2:13: the altar receives what is preserving and unchanging, while what ferments and changes belongs to ordinary food.; Baruch A. Levine, JPS Torah Commentary: Leviticus (Jewish Publication Society, 1989), on Leviticus 2:11-13; Menahem Haran, Temples and Temple Service in Ancient Israel (Clarendon, 1978), 205ff., 316ff.