The Feast of Unleavened Bread (Matzot)

Sacrifices & Feasts of the Old Testament collection. Seven days from Nisan 15, so tightly bound to Passover the names are often used interchangeably. Paul takes this feast and applies it to church discipline in 1 Cor 5 - probably the NT's most practically consequential use of any OT festival.

Requirements

• Seven days, Nisan 15-21, straight after the Passover sacrifice on the 14th.
• All leaven removed from every house (Exod 12:15, 19). Not merely avoided - purged. Penalty for eating leavened bread that week = being cut off from Israel.
  • Ashley: the phrase "that person shall be cut off from Israel" occurs in only two Pentateuch passages - here and Num 19:13 - and the parallel with corpse contamination suggests that death is in view.
• Holy convocations on days 1 and 7, with a partial work prohibition, not the total cessation of the Sabbath.
• Pilgrimage feast - one of three requiring all males at the sanctuary (Deut 16:16), though in practice whole families went (Deut 16:11).
• Additional sacrifices each of the seven days (Num 28:17-25): 14 bulls total, 7 rams, 49 lambs as burnt offerings, plus 7 male goats as purification offerings.
  • Ashley: the arithmetic is deliberate, organised around seven throughout the festival calendar.

Two Meanings

The Stated Meaning Is Haste

• "You shall eat it in haste" (Exod 12:11). Dough had no time to rise because the Egyptians urged them out (12:34, 39).
• Deut 16:3 calls it "the bread of affliction, for you came out of the land of Egypt in haste."
• The bread is a memorial of a departure that couldn't wait.

The Developed Meaning Is Purity

• Leaven in Israel wasn't commercial yeast. Fee's description:

It consisted of keeping back a 'little' portion of last week's dough, allowing it to ferment, then adding it to this week's dough, which in turn was thoroughly fermented to give it lightness (= sourdough bread).

• Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NICNT)

• That method explains the symbolism. Fermentation is essentially controlled decay. Osborne notes yeast and honey were both banned from the altar "probably because fermentation was viewed as corruption."
• Fee: the annual purge may have had a practical health dimension too - week-on-week fermentation increased contamination risk, so once a year they cleared it out.
• Two features that impact the NT:
  1. Leaven works by permeation - the whole force of the proverb.
  2. Leaven is carried over, week to week, from old dough into new. That's what makes it such a precise image for inherited corruption.

Note: Don't Preach "Leaven Always Means Sin"

• Leavened bread wasn't universally banned. It accompanied the praise fellowship offering (Lev 7:13); the two loaves waved at Pentecost were expressly baked with leaven (Lev 23:17).
• Sklar: leavened bread "was like the Israelites' normal fare" and so expressed thanksgiving for daily bread. Mechanism that allowed it - couldn't be burned on the altar, but could be waved and received back.
• So the symbolism is contextual, not absolute. Corruption in the Passover context; ordinary daily provision in the harvest context. Matt 13:33 complicates it further.

New Testament Fulfilment - 1 Corinthians 5:6-8

Situation: a man in the congregation living with his father's wife, and a church proud of its tolerance of it. Paul's argument happens in three steps.

1. The Proverb

• "A little leaven leavens the whole lump" - probably Jewish folk wisdom. Fee's comparison: "a bad apple spoils the whole barrel."
• Point is permeation. The congregation is in imminent danger of being spoiled.
• Fee's line: "A church exposed to corruption would do well to sing in a lower key."

2. The Imperative from the Feast

• "Cleanse out the old leaven" = the domestic purge of Exod 12:15, which Fee notes "had long been a part of his Jewish experience."
• Immediate referent = removal of the incestuous man. Closing verse widens it to the community's whole moral life.

3. The Indicative Underneath It

• Paul says "cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump," which sounds as though the doing produces the being - then immediately corrects himself: "as you really are unleavened."

As always in Paul, the imperative, even though it must be obeyed, cannot be turned into a piece of legal material, obedience to which brings favor with God. Right at the point where the imperative sounds as if it comes first ('Get rid of the old so that you may be new'), he reminds them that what they must become is what they already are by the grace of God. 'Become what you are' is the basic nature of Paul's parenesis… The indicative always comes first.

• Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NICNT)

4. The Ongoing Feast

• Israel kept it seven days each spring. Paul says "let us celebrate the festival" in the present continuous.
• Fee reads it as extending the metaphor to its broadest implications… "on the basis of the crucifixion of Christ, God's people are to keep an ongoing feast of the celebration of God's forgiveness by holy living."
• The week has become the whole Christian life.
• Fee suggests a secondary allusion to the Lord's Table, given the context of expelling a brother and v. 11's instruction not even to eat with him - but he doesnt really expand on it.

What Paul Doesn't Do

• He doesn't require the Corinthians to purge literal leaven from their kitchens. Nothing suggests Gentile Christians should keep Matzot.
• Festival supplies the logic and the vocabulary; the practice it produces is church discipline, not a dietary calendar.
• Exactly the shadow-and-substance pattern of Col 2:17 working itself out in a real congregation.
• Keener's underlines how naturally Paul reaches for it: he's writing before Pentecost (1 Cor 16:8), fifty days after Passover, "so Passover could well be fresh on his mind."

Application

• Sin in a congregation is not a private matter between an individual and God. It ferments - and it does so by being carried over. Last week's tolerated compromise becomes this week's assumed normal.
• That's why Paul treats the boasting as the primary offence rather than the man's sin. The congregation had decided that overlooking it was a sign of maturity.
• And the ground of the discipline isn't the church's own standards. It's the lamb. "Cleanse out the old leaven… for Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed."
• Purity is a response to an accomplished redemption:

Christ has died for us not simply to give us passage to heaven but to re-create us in his own image, so that both individually and corporately we may express the character of God by the way we live.

• Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NICNT)