This blog is supposed to be a running explication of the research I am doing as I write a historical novel retelling the Exodus without resorting to miracles. But it’s my final post before Passover 2026, and I’ve been saving up a link I found last summer for the occasion.
The article is called “The Secrets of Matzah,” and — unusually for me — it’s not by an academically credentialed researcher. It’s by a rabbi and fan of the deceased food adventurer Anthony Bourdain, and refers to an episode of “No Reservations” in which Tony is hosted by a rural farming family in Egypt. The menu includes bread that, according to the author of the piece, looks almost identical to matzah.
“The hosts on the farm made bread . . . the same way it could have been made 3,000 years ago,” writes Mordechai Rackover, editor in chief of a website called ExploringJudaism.org. Water and flour are mixed quickly, and the resulting dough is rolled out thin, perforated, and baked briefly in an extremely hot oven 18 minutes after the first drops of water touch the flour. Rackover says that there is another kind of matzah that isn’t rolled out quite as flat but is also put into a super-hot oven shortly after being mixed; it ends up being softer, more like the type of bread one might eat with gyros at a Greek restaurant. He thinks this texture is probably closer to what the Israelites brought with them as they escaped from Pharaoh.
I came upon the article when I decided that the grandmother of my two teenage protagonists should be a former worker in Pharaoh’s bakery. It wasn’t my primary research inspiration. I relied much more on a piece uploaded to www.academia.edu by a director of conservation at Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiques named Venice Ibrahim Attia. His “Bread in Ancient Egypt” describes several different breadmaking methods, including those experienced outside of Cairo by Bourdain. But according to Attia, “lighter and more tasty” breads were fermented for a full day after the dough was formed and left lightly covered in the mixing bowl. Based on my own yearslong attempts at breadmaking, the dough was probably punched down a few times and left to rise again before being baked. Unfortunately, that’s the kind of activity that leaves no archaeological trace, even in a culture as obsessed with creating forever legacies as ancient Egypt (for instance, much of what we know about how they made bread comes from grave goods statuettes that depict the process).
Attia says that, even with 100% human-powered flour grinding, such delicacies as “pastries and cakes” were also enjoyed in ancient Egypt. I figured they were definitely part of Pharaoh’s meal planning, so my grandma character is (and I won’t deny that this is vicarious wish-fulfillment on my part, which is any novelist’s prerogative) an excellent baker. She, and every other food preparer at the time, will likely have made a variety of breads depending on what the main part of the meal consisted of. Crisp flatbreads might have accompanied slices of grilled lamb or homemade goat cheese topped with cucumber, while a softer bread may have been needed to mop up bowls of lentil or tilapia stew.
The Bible specifically mentions that the Israelites “took their bread [with them] before it was leavened” on the flight from Egypt (Exodus 12:34), which says to me that the day-long rising practice was at least as common as the crispbread-making method. I certainly would have let my dough rise as often as possible, maybe even using sourdough starter, a.k.a. “mother dough,” which is hardly a modern invention. Crackers make a nice change of pace once in a while, but if flavorful thick bread is available just by leaving out the dough for a day, why not go for it?
This post — actually, the blog itself — could be subtitled, “Why Everything Jewish Today Really Comes from Ancient Egypt.” So I will mention another bit of research I recently came across about an Egyptian god named Khonsu. By the time of the New Kingdom, which covers the period many scholars think that the Exodus might have occurred, Khonsu was worshipped in Temple of Karnak texts as the creator of the universe: “[T]he great god of the first moment . . . who came into existence at the beginning.” The texts also mention Khonsu, possibly with his mother and/or consort, watching “the waters circulate in their sight” and say that his son will “illuminate the land from darkness.” All of this phraseology is very familiar from the Book of Genesis (Gen 1:1–3). Does this mean that Khonsu is the original version of Yahveh, the god of Israel?
Well, there’s a bunch of other lines in those Temple of Karnak verses, including some that might be more appropriate to the Song of Solomon: “May I give to you Maat [the goddess of harmony and social balance] with this my left hand . . . that you might anoint the skin with her sight . . . that you might live in her flesh, that you might fashion with her precious stone glistening on her skin, that your heart might come out of the semen of your father . . .” The cosmogony also includes a whole lot of extras, compared with the elegant austerity of the Genesis myth that simply enumerates days and catalogs the aspects of the universe created. “The sky will spit forth an egg, like the egg of a falcon,” says the Karnak praise. “. . . That is how the second snake came into being with the face of a beetle likewise.”
The excerpts I am including here, translated by Eugene Cruz-Uribe of the University of Indiana East, make much more sense to modern eyes than the original, believe me.
So while I do think it is possible that the concept of a creator god — as opposed to other gods with other jobs — might have come to the Bible by way of the Egyptians, I don’t know that it’s fair to give them all the credit. In some ways, there is less to Genesis than there is to the Egyptian theophanies — and that is not a bad thing. As the Jewish Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once famously said, “There is no great writing, only great rewriting.” Even if Khonsu was the first draft, Yahveh has become the final version — at least up to now.
