Shavuot is coming on June 9 (starts June 8 at sundown). Some of you say, what is Shavuot? It’s the biblical Feast of Weeks, better known to Christians as Pentecost.
Here is an excerpt from FEAST about Shavuot. I hope we can make the loaves better this year. It makes me wonder how those priests did it with much less technological kitchen gear!
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The oven in our little apartment just wasn’t big enough. Two tenths of an ephah is a lot of flour. That’s how big the loaf was supposed to be that the Israelites offered as a first-fruits offering to God in Leviticus 23:17. We wanted to bake one ourselves to experience as a family a little bit of the biblical past.
We found out there was a debate about whether Leviticus 23:17 means two loaves each being one tenth of an ephah, or if both were to be two tenths. Even one tenth of an ephah is a lot, about four liters or one gallon.
We decided to make a Shavuot loaf of whole wheat from only one tenth of an ephah. If you do the math, you find that this single loaf was supposed to have 16 cups of flour in it; our normal bread recipe called for four cups. It wasn’t pretty and our oven is still recovering, but we pushed forward and fashioned an irregular mass as large as a beach ball. We couldn’t get it to cook through without burning, but even our bread disaster was a blessing to us. We tore off pieces from the bread beach ball and dipped them in honey and imagined living in temple times.
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See more about FEAST here.
See a video of me promoting FEAST here.
