Similar to the kingdom of heaven is leaven that a woman, taking, hid in three measures of flour until was leavened all.
Matthew 13.33
Of all the parables, this one received the highest number of “red” votes from the Jesus Seminar, a gathering of scholars who seek “to renew the quest of the historical Jesus and to report the results of its research to the general public, rather than just to a handful of gospel specialists. Initially, the goal of the Seminar was to review each of the sayings and deeds attributed to Jesus in the gospels and determine which of them could be considered authentic.”1 According to the seminar’s website:
Like the mustard seed, the parable of the leaven makes light of an established symbol. Leaven was customarily regarded as a symbol for corruption and evil. Jesus here employs it in a positive sense. That makes his use of the image striking and provocative. . . . To compare God’s imperial rule to leaven is to compare it to something corrupt and unholy, just the opposite of what God’s rule is supposed to be. This reversal appears to be characteristic of several of Jesus’s sayings, such as “The last will be first and the first last.” The Fellows included the parable of the leaven in that small group of sayings and parables that almost certainly originated with Jesus.2
The seminar’s goal of determining what Jesus said is a worthy one; its concern to locate Jesus in his own historical context is similarly worthy. However, it is also essential to study that historical context, and here all the good intention in the world cannot compensate for indigestible results. When heard in its own context, the parable of the Leaven can be subversive, but what it subverts is not the image of the holy.
The Leaven should get a rise out of its hearers, but in order to experience this, we need to clean our palates of both the bland, white-bread interpretations and the toxic ones as well.
Most interpretations of the parable of the Leaven, like interpretations of most parables, are obvious and uninteresting. For this parable, we hear comments such as: “Out of the most insignificant beginnings, invisible to human eye, God creates his mighty Kingdom, which embraces all the peoples of the world”;3 or “As yeast works to leaven the dough, so the growth of the kingdom is inevitable”; or “Just as few converts, like yeast, can work to convert the entire population”; or “God’s rule, like yeast, working in a hidden way, will pervade one’s life, giving it a new quality.”
We do not need a parable to tell us that the divine kingdom is “mighty,” and there are better ways of assuring us that the kingdom will come. Leaven is not, in fact, “invisible”; leaven in antiquity is what we today call sourdough starter. Nor is it insignificant—it is essential for baking. The idea of the leavened dough as embracing all peoples creates for me a mixed metaphor in which I picture Strega Nona’s spaghetti pot overflowing into the streets and choking the population. The idea of the divine rule as permeating one’s life is good, albeit with an individualistic focus that runs contrary to the concerns of Jesus as best as they can be determined, given his interest in community. Nor does the reading give any sense of either what this internal rule is or how it manifests itself. If the parable says that “acknowledging God means you’ll be a better person,” again, the point may be true, but it is by no means shocking.
Although the various allegorical moves—the dough represents the entire world; the dough represents the individual—are all plausible, none is compelling. Such interpretations leave little to chew on or to savor. Rather than catch in the throat—a matter that really is something of life and death—bland interpretations slide easily down the gullet and pass quickly through the body.
Such white-bread servings can already be made tastier by attention to how else bread functions in Jesus’s teachings. “Give us this day our daily bread,” the phrase from the Lord’s Prayer or the “Our Father” (Matt. 6.11; cf. Luke 11.3), speaks to several Jewish concerns, from the view that as God fed us in the wilderness with manna (Exod. 16; Num. 11; Deut. 8), so God will continue to provide for our needs, to the image of the world to come as a giant banquet, in which “people will come from east and west, from north and south, and will eat in the kingdom of God” (Luke 13.29; cf. Matt. 8.11). The term translated “daily,” Greek epiousion, has a connotation of “for tomorrow” or “for the future,” and that complements the idea of the eschatological or heavenly banquet.
This Jewish idea of feasting in the world to come permeates the stories of Jesus, and permeates his own mission as well. Luke’s story of Jesus opens with his being placed in a “manger,” that is, a feeding trough. What more delicious symbolism could there be for the person who would compare his body to bread? Jesus feeds thousands, in recollection of how the ancient prophets Elijah and Elisha provided food and in both an anticipation of and a present enactment of the kingdom of heaven.
Jesus consistently meets people at table, dines indiscriminately, is continually associated with food—imagery made most memorable at the Last Supper. He tells a desperate gentile mother who is seeking a healing for her daughter, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food [i.e., his healing ministry] and throw it to the dogs,” but she convinces him to act by cleverly reheating his words: “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs” (Mark 7.27–28; cf. Matt. 15.26–27).
Paul, who wrote his letters before the evangelists produced their Gospels, describes the institution of the Eucharist:
For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” (1 Cor. 11.23–25)
By the time we get to John’s Gospel, Jesus has become the “bread of life” (6.35) and “the living bread that came down from heaven” (6.51).
Any parable with a reference to leaven, dough, or bread brings with it all this appetizing accompaniment, and it makes the parable much more nourishing. There is thus necessarily more going on in the parable than a lesson on “the growth of the kingdom.”
The plain and palatable are, however, better than the indigestible or poisonous. Some pastors or homilists still drag out the standard view that whatever Jesus said must somehow relate to how morbid or moribund his early Jewish context had become. Thus we still hear comments like: “The yeast is mightily permeating the dead lump of religious Judaism,”4 or “The Kingdom arrives as a negation of the established temple and cult and replaces them with a sacrament of its own—a new and leavened bread.”5 According to the founder of the Jesus Seminar, Robert Funk, the parable shows how Jesus wielded his “herculean wrecking bar” in order to “precipitate the loss of the perceived world of Judaism. . . . The world in which the scribes and Pharisees were at home was shattered upon a new world designed for the poor and destitute, the tax collectors and sinners. The righteousness of the Pharisees was devalued as confederate paper.”6
Matthew, in whose Gospel our parable appears and who insists that the righteousness of the followers of Jesus must “exceed” that of the scribes and Pharisees (5.20), would have found this an odd comment. So would Jesus’s initial followers—all Jews living a Jewish life in a Jewish world. So would other Jews, who blessed, broke, and ate leavened bread, their daily bread.7 Interpretations that insist on constructing a pervasive, official Judaism that establishes categories of the “religiously disinherited” and that is antithetical to “the destitute, the maimed and the blind,”8 may seem tasty at first—but they poison the food and therefore poison the recipient.
To appreciate the parable, we must attend to the elements, such as the cultural understanding of yeast and the amount of bread that three measures of flour would yield. We need to recognize how the parable draws upon images from the scriptures of Israel as well as how it matches flavors with the numerous references to bread in the Gospels themselves. We need to correct the translations that have the woman “mixing” the yeast into the dough, because that is not what the Greek says. And we do well to see what the combined imagery of women and dough, hiding and ovens would have suggested to people living in the first century.
The term for “yeast” (Gk. zume) refers to sourdough starter and not to those little red packets of cultured yeast that sit in refrigerator doors. This starter is created when water mixes with the naturally occurring yeast spores that end up in flour when it is ground, and then the yeast’s enzymes break down the starch in the flour and convert it into glucose; the starter serves as the leavening agent when it is subsequently mixed in with more dough. Anyone who has ever made starter can watch the decomposition process. Recipes instruct bakers to place the starter in a bowl, cover the bowl with a dishcloth, and let the mixture sit in a warm, breezeless place, such as a dark oven. As the mixture sits, the fermentation process takes place. The starter is ready when what the recipe books call a “pleasant sour smell” develops and the mixture has bubbles.
Granted, I come from a long line of women whose skills were never well displayed in the kitchen; my mother was a mediocre cook, and I am a domestic disaster. Nevertheless, the idea of sour smell combined with a bubbly mixture created by the process of fermentation—that is, enzyme decay—does not immediately strike me as palatable. To the contrary, there’s an “ick” factor at play. The process, with its possible negative connotations, was already known in antiquity. Plutarch mentions that yeast is the “product of corruption” and that “the process of leavening seems to be one of putrefaction.”9 Whereas zume is required to produce bread, and there are few things more appealing than the aroma and taste of freshly baked bread, the starter is utilitarian at best.
This brief foray into the culinary arts complements the view of yeast that we find in Jesus’s cultural (pun intended) world. The comparison of the kingdom to yeast might well have been surprising to a first-century Jewish audience, since yeast, especially when used metaphorically, could have a negative valence. Metaphorically speaking, there is good yeast and there is bad yeast, and Jesus appears to have used the metaphor in its negative sense.
One need not be a Bible scholar or an expert in Greek to recognize this fact; all one needs is a concordance. In addition to appearances in Matthew 13.33 and Luke 13.21, the term “yeast” or “leaven” shows up eleven times in the New Testament, and each occasion hints of something whose taste is a bit off. Following the scene traditionally known as the Feeding of the Four Thousand (Matt. 15.32–38; the title is a demographic understatement, given that “those who had eaten were four thousand men, besides women and children”), Jesus and the disciples cross the Sea of Galilee into a region called Magadan. The disciples, who are not the sharpest knives in the drawer, realize that they had forgotten to bring any bread. This should not have worried them, as Jesus has amply demonstrated, twice, providing food is not a problem.
Picking up on their worry, Jesus turns the conversation into a metaphoric warning: “Watch out, and beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees” (Matt. 16.6; see also Mark 8.15; Luke 12.1). The disciples consistently misinterpret his comment; they think he is annoyed because they had forgotten to bring bread. Many things annoy Jesus—hypocrisy, injustice, lack of concern for the poor, failure to love God and neighbor. Forgetting a snack does not make his top-ten list.
Moreover, at least as far as Matthew is concerned, Jesus is capable of fasting for forty days (4.2). Immediately after the baptism, the Spirit leads Jesus to the desert, where Satan tempts him. It is during this “temptation” that the imagery of bread first appears in the Gospel. Satan cajoles the starving Jesus, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” Jesus responds by quoting Deuteronomy 8.3: “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4.4). With this comment he does not dismiss the importance of bread, for hungry people must be fed. Rather, he makes clear that his focus is not only on bread, but also on the divine word. The same chapter of Deuteronomy from which Jesus quotes makes the point: “Therefore keep the commandments of the LORD your God, by walking in his ways and by fearing him. For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land . . . where you may eat bread without scarcity” (8.6–9). Matthew, likely coming from a Jewish context, may well have anticipated that readers would bring knowledge of the rest of the chapter to bear on their understanding of Jesus’s response.
The disciples in Matthew are not thinking about Deuteronomy, Jesus’s miracles, or even the use of metaphor; they are thinking with their stomachs. Jesus rebukes them by accusing them of having “little faith” and then by reminding them about the feedings of the multitudes. Finally, exasperated, he asks, “How could you fail to perceive that I was not speaking about bread? Beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees!” (16.9–11). “Then,” says Matthew, the disciples realize that Jesus was not talking about “the yeast of bread,” but about the teachings of his opponents.
This use of leaven to suggest something negative, such as misleading teaching, bubbles up in Paul’s language as well. In 1 Corinthians 5.6–8, Paul uses the metaphor of “yeast” to describe the negative effects of boasting; such displays of self-importance in the community can ferment and so lead to a breakdown in the communal body. Paul complains, “Your boasting is not a good thing. Do you not know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough?” (see also Gal. 5.9, where Paul uses the same metaphor to describe the ill effects on the congregation of a competing gospel). The modern analogy would be, “One bad apple spoils the whole bunch.”
Paul then develops the metaphor by appealing to the association of the holiday of Passover with unleavened bread. The image, from the book of Exodus, is a Jewish one, but those gentile followers of Jesus to whom Paul writes would have known it; the Septuagint (LXX), the Greek translation of the scriptures of Israel, was their Bible as well. He tells his congregation, “Clean out the old yeast so that you may be a new batch, as you really are unleavened. For our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed” (1 Cor. 5.7). With one sentence, he manages to reinforce the negative connotations of yeast, associate Jesus with the paschal offering that saves from death, and associate the congregation with matzoh, unleavened bread, which the Israelites ate during the exodus and which Jews to this day traditionally eat instead of leavened bread on the eight days of Passover. Paul reinforces the negative connotations of leaven with his concluding sentence, “Therefore, let us celebrate the festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (5.8).
The term “yeast,” used metaphorically in the New Testament, has a negative connotation. Yet at least in the Gospels, it is particular leaven that is the problem. The leaven “of the Pharisees” is to be avoided, but not the leaven that Jesus offers. This distinction between different forms of leaven appears in patristic treatment. In his Epistle to the Magnesians, the early second-century bishop of Antioch, Ignatius, alludes to Paul’s metaphor: “Put aside then the evil leaven, which has grown old and sour, and turn to the new leaven, which is Jesus Christ. Be salted in him, that none among you may be corrupted, since by your savor you shall be tested.” Ignatius then, anticipating the indigestible anti-Jewish readings of the parable, concludes, “It is monstrous to talk of Jesus Christ and to practice Judaism.”10 There is no milk of magnesians to coat this metaphor.
Picking up Ignatius’s crummy conclusion, some biblical scholars further misconstrue leaven’s metaphorical register by associating it with the category “impurity”; they then extend the misconstrual by associating it with various forms of moral corruption. Even more problematic, they go on to equate moral corruption with patterns of first-century Jewish life or with Jewish views of holiness. For example, Robert Funk proposes that “the Kingdom comes as an inversion of what everybody takes to be the case with the sacred” and concludes that the parable could signal the entry of “tax collectors and harlots,” but not Pharisees, into the kingdom.11 I’m not seeing much of a “last shall be first and first shall be last” in the parable; “all leavened” means exactly that: all is leavened. There’s no division in this story, and there’s no need to import into it questions of sacrality.
Extending this (unnecessary) connection between leaven and corruption, another commentator proposes that “the parable opposes traditional understandings of the holiness and purity of the people of God” and “a ‘corrupting’ of the people of God through the inclusion of outcasts.”12 This study, published in 1988, is now available online at a website designed to promote the role of women in Roman Catholic settings.13 The ends (a concern for women’s inclusion) do not justify the means (an ahistorical reading of the parable by presenting Judaism as a system creating “outcasts”). In like manner, a homiletics professor proposes in an essay on preaching the parable, “The presence of a ‘contaminating’ element fundamental to the reign of God might serves as an illustration of Jesus’s welcome of the outcast.”14 The parable has much to commend it, but it says nothing about “outcasts.” Even Paul, who does want to bar people from his churches (the very same letter in which Paul uses the metaphor of leaven exhorts, “But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother or sister who is sexually immoral or greedy, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or robber. Do not even eat with such a one” [1 Cor. 5.11]), does not associate leaven with casting out people.
Similarly, Jesus Seminar scholar Bernard Brandon Scott connects both the woman and the yeast to impurity; he notes, correctly, that although “it is not true to say that in general women were viewed as unclean and men clean, it is true that in religion, especially purity codes, women were at a disadvantage.”15 He then concludes that the yeast represents “moral corruption” and that Jesus deconstructs the purity codes: “All those who were unable for one reason or another to observe the purity code would be leaven and that would be most folks.”16 In like manner, Barbara Reid finds that the parable “proclaims that God’s realm thoroughly incorporates persons who would have been considered corrupt, unclean, or sinners according to the prevailing interpretations of the Jewish purity regulations” and finally concludes that the parable disrupts the xenophobia of “Jewish Christians,” because it implies the mixing of gentiles into the dough of the church.17 Suddenly the parable has become a countercultural manifesto designed to subvert a negatively stereotyped Judaism that creates outcasts of pretty much everyone.
Contributing to this unpalatable approach is the frequent narrow reading of the scriptures of Israel and rabbinic texts. One scholar insists, “Leaven in the Bible, without exception, is used as a symbol of corruption by unclean or sinful things. . . . Throughout the Hebrew scriptures, leaven is a symbol of the unholy, indeed, of the ungodly!”18 The inevitable conclusion is: “Leaven is a symbol of sin, of evil, of rank unbelievers,” and the parable has to do with the “exclusion of the impure from God’s anticipated kingdom in first-century religious thought.”19 Who knew?
Problems here proliferate. First, the parable says nothing about purity, outcasts, or gentiles. Leaven is not itself “impure”; if it were, Jews would not have had to remove it from their homes at Passover, because they would not have used it in the first place. Throughout the scriptures of Israel, “leaven” is used primarily to speak of the products that need to be removed during the Passover holiday. The commandment, “You shall remove leaven from your houses” (Exod. 12.15) indicates that other than the week of Passover, leaven is a staple product. One does not enjoin the removal of something that is not present.
If yeast were impure, bread would be too; that very point should demonstrate why purity is the wrong category. The Temple, the ultimate place of purity, is also the place where leavened bread serves as an offering to God. Leviticus 7.13 provides the following instruction for the “thanksgiving sacrifice of well-being”: “You shall bring your offering with cakes of leavened bread” (Heb. chometz; Gk. artois zumitais). Amos 4.5 speaks similarly of the “thank offering of leavened bread.” The positive valence of the term “flour” confirms the positive view of the (leavened) bread; “flour” is used most often in the Bible in relation to Temple offerings.
As a modern analogy, I doubt that Jews who recite the traditional grace before meals, “Blessed are you, O Lord our God, sovereign of the universe, who brings forth bread from the earth (ha-motzi lechem min ha’aretz),” are associating leavened bread with the unholy or the ungodly.
Finally, Leviticus 23.17, in setting out instructions for offerings to God, states: “You shall bring from your settlements two loaves of bread as an elevation offering, each made of two-tenths of an ephah; they shall be of choice flour, baked with leaven (zumoo), as first fruits to the LORD.” The holiday for which these instructions serve is the spring harvest festival, known as Shavuot (“Weeks”) in Hebrew; for the Jewish community, the holiday commemorates the receiving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai. The church baptizes this holiday into the celebration of Pentecost, the time it proclaims that the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus’s followers (see Acts 2).
Yeast is not impure or “unclean”; neither is mustard seed, the principle image in the parable that both Matthew (13.31–32) and Luke (13.18–19) juxtapose to this parable.20 Jesus is comparing the kingdom to leaven that a woman used in preparing bread; he is not saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like a piece of bacon or road kill.” Indeed, the image of “leaven” or “yeast” in the literature at the time of Jesus spanned the positive to the negative.21 The first-century Jewish philosopher Philo remarks that leaven functions symbolically in two ways: “Leaven . . . stands for food in its most complete and perfect form, such that in our daily usage none is found to be superior or more nourishing” and “everything that is leavened rises, and joy is the rational elevation of the soul.”22 Also giving leaven positive connotations, Rabbi Jehoshua ben Levi said: “Great is peace, for it is as the leaven to dough. If the Holy One had not given peace to the world, sword and beast would devour up the whole world, as it is written, ‘And I will give peace in the land’” (Derekh Eretz Zuta; the biblical citation is Lev. 26.6). Moving toward the negative image is Rabbi Abahu’s reflection that God took responsibility for human evil: “It was I that put the bad leaven in the dough, for ‘the inclination of a person’s heart is evil from his youth’” (Tanhuma Noah 4; the comment is a gloss on Gen. 8.21). Thus, there is no reason why any reader in antiquity would equate the term with impurity; whether the term is positive or negative needs to derive from context.
Next, as far as women’s impurity goes, the commentators overstate (at best). Given the late onset of menstruation, the early onset of menopause, frequent pregnancies, and the likely cessation of the menstrual cycle during lactation, it may well have been the case that men—who are impure after ejaculation—were more often impure than women. Somehow, this point never finds its way into sermons. I similarly doubt that most Jewish women who gave birth or men who ejaculated thought to themselves, “Damn. I’m in a state of ritual impurity.”
Most damning to this view of yeast as suggesting impurity is the fact that there is no historical basis for the claim that Judaism made outcasts of people who did not observe the purity laws or the related claim that the purity laws themselves were an impossible burden on the poor. Archaeological investigation of the Galilee shows numerous miqvaot (ritual bathing pools); stone vessels, which do not convey impurity; Sabbath lamps; and an absence of pig bones. Jesus and his fellow Jews observed the purity laws; it was easy for them to do so, both because of what was available in their environment and what was not. The same point holds for Jews throughout the centuries who to this day continue these observances.
Jesus did not do away with purity laws, and neither did his immediate followers. There would be no reason for them to do so within a Jewish environment. Purity practices are not a form of social marginalizing. To the contrary, they are a recognition of the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, then as now. Going to the Temple should not be the same thing as going to the market. Attending to the birth of a child or the burial of a corpse should not be followed immediately by a return to the world of business as usual, but should require taking the time to recognize the power of life and death. By engaging in distinctive practices concerning diet and immersion, Jews recognize the importance of the body. For those early Jews, the practices not only manifested their participation in the covenant; they also affirmed their identity as Jews within the wider Roman Empire. We might think of purity concerns as an ancient form of what we today call “multiculturalism” or “identity formation.” As soon as “purity” gets on the menu of certain forms of New Testament exegesis, the taste is predictably a bad one, and the food is again spoiled.
Although it is correct to claim that the connection between yeast and the kingdom might be unexpected, especially given its uses in the New Testament, it is too much to conclude, as others have done, that “the very beginning of the parable with the simple word ‘leaven’ would throw an audience off guard and maybe into a panic,”23 or that in thinking of yeast we might think of the swelling of a “decomposing corpse,”24 given an association with fermentation or even a cancerous breast tumor.25
Hearing that the Romans are invading would cause the people to panic. I doubt that same reaction would be prompted by a metaphor, especially when that metaphor is couched in all sorts of positive images, such as women baking and three measures of flour. Cursing the name of the divine is blasphemous; claiming there is more than one God is blasphemous; eating a bagel made with yeast is not (although eating a bagel with mayonnaise comes close). A decomposing corpse would be a major source of impurity, but Jews surely can tell the difference between a cadaver and a crumpet. In thinking of fermentation, I am more inclined to associate yeast with beer making or more broadly with fermentation of grapes into wine. A malignant tumor is a tragedy, but it has nothing to do with fermentation, yeast, bread, or Jewish purity laws. Finally, the parable has nothing to do with the Temple, an institution in which leavened bread—showbread—was part of the daily offering. In like manner, the yeasty hot-cross buns sold at the church bazaar every Easter are not attacks on the Eucharist or the Roman Catholic Church.
Yeast need not have a negative connotation, but it might have one. If the Pharisees and opposing teachers have a bad form of leaven that taints whatever it touches with hypocrisy or incorrect doctrine, then the leaven Jesus provides would have the opposite effect: it permeates “all” the good dough it has infused and gives rise to something nutritious. For our parable then, the image of leaven requires at least an initial assessment: Is this good leaven or bad? Is something bad being turned into something good, or do we pay attention to the potential of its power, for good or ill? The symbolism, at least initially, is indeterminate.
Jesus tells parables with female characters: an importuning widow, a woman who loses and finds her coin, five wise and five not so wise virgins awaiting a bridegroom. There is nothing surprising about women appearing in stories—they’ve been doing so since, well, Eve (or, if you prefer, Tiamat, Isis, Astarte, or Gaia). As long as there have been women, there have been stories told about and by them.
Women, and feminine images in general, have been connected with the sacred: Woman Wisdom of Proverbs and the Wisdom of Solomon; the Shekhina, the feminine presence of the divine; the prophets Miriam, Deborah, Huldah, and their sisters, including Philip’s four virgin daughters; and so on. Given the numerous positive women figures in early Judaism, the idea that the kingdom of heaven can be compared to a woman who bakes is no more shocking than the idea that it can be compared to a fellow who plants seed or a fellow who seeks a lost lamb.
In the biblical tradition, women have also been connected with the not so sacred, from Ben Sirach’s assertion, “From a woman sin had its beginning, and because of her we all die” (25.24), to the Whore of Babylon in the book of Revelation. Thus we cannot, simply from the reference to the woman in the parable, tell anything about her status. Given that she is engaged in something relative to the kingdom of heaven, we are justified in seeing what she does in a positive light.
The extent to which we focus on the woman herself is up for debate. One could make the argument that it is not the woman who is the focus, but the leaven: “Similar to the kingdom of heaven is leaven that a woman . . . hid.” But I would not want to dismiss the woman as the main actor.26 Her presence is accentuated in the version of this parable presented by the Gospel of Thomas. This collection of sayings, which looks much like the hypothetical Q source, is preserved not in Greek or even Aramaic, but in Coptic. In this version, “Jesus said, ‘The Father’s imperial rule is like [a] woman who took a little leaven, [hid] it in dough, and made it into large loaves of bread. Anyone here with two ears had better listen!” (Thomas 96).27
Thomas compares the kingdom not directly to the yeast, but to the woman who took the yeast. Had Matthew’s parable read, “The kingdom of heaven is like a woman who hid yeast in dough,” perhaps we’d find stained-glass windows of female chefs in many churches to go along with the windows of Jesus the sower, Jesus the Good Shepherd, and Jesus the bridegroom.28 Then again, there are very few stained-glass windows of women seeking lost coins, despite the fact that the windows portray the shepherd seeking his sheep as Jesus and the one who welcomes the prodigal as God the Father.
The greater problem with the parable is not the woman, but what she does. According to most major English translations, the woman “mixed” the yeast with three measures of flour. The problem is that the Greek does not say “mixed.” The Greek term is enkrypto, which comes from a root meaning “hide,” as in cryptology, or secret-code making, or, to be closest to the Greek, “encryption.” Thus, she is literally doing something secretly with an ambivalent or multivalent substance that works by processes of decay.
Whereas the parable of the Leaven is the only place in the New Testament where this verb is found, the cognate verb krypto—that is, the verb without the prefix—is common. In many cases, it refers not only to something that is hidden, but to something that should or must be uncovered. In Luke 8.17 (Mark 4.22), Jesus insists, “Nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light.” In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells his disciples, “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid” (Matt. 5.14). Whether the Gospel of John sought to correct this association of the disciples with light or to complement it by having Jesus claim, twice (John 8.12; 9.5), that he is the light of the world, remains an open question. In either case, again, what is hidden must be made manifest.
Matthew reinforces the idea that what is hidden is something precious that belongs to Jesus and his followers by depicting Jesus as thanking God for having “hidden” information about Jesus himself as well as the final judgment from “the wise and intelligent,” but revealing it to “infants,” that is, the trusting church (11.25). Two chapters later, just a few verses after the Leaven parable, Matthew explains that Jesus spoke in parables “to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet”; Jesus says, “I will open my mouth to speak in parables; I will proclaim what has been hidden from the foundation of the world” (13.35). The reference is to Psalm 78.2, which in the Hebrew reads, “I will open my mouth in a parable (mashal); I will utter riddles (chidot) from ancient times.” The Septuagint (Psalm 77.2) provides a different version, which appears to underlie Matthew’s quote: “I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter riddles (problemata [whence “problems”]) from the beginning.” The citation is more likely Matthew’s conclusion than Jesus’s own self-description, but it does fit the general view that Jesus revealed mysteries previously unknown or at least unarticulated.
The term “to hide” appears in Luke 18.34 and 19.42 in reference to the truth of Jesus that was, temporarily, unavailable to those who encountered him. Colossians 3.3 proclaims that the lives of Jesus’s followers are currently “hidden with Christ in God,” but will be revealed when Jesus is made manifest. According to 1 Timothy 5.25, “Good works are conspicuous; and even when they are not, they cannot remain hidden.”
Whatever that woman is doing, its results will come to light. What is hidden is only hidden so that it can be brought forth, and in that revelation the original is somehow transformed: the infants gain special knowledge; the disciples, new insight; the faithful, a new way of being; the world, more good works than it had ever known. “Hiding,” like “yeast,” can have a negative valence, but in this parable it is a hiding that will lead to something wonderful.
This hiding, together with images of three measures of flour and of a woman baking, should send readers to the scriptures of Israel. Like hiding a baby Jesus in a king cake for Mardi Gras, so the parable hides in its words an allusion to an ancient narrative.
Three measures, in first-century terms, is not synonymous with three cups. Three measures of flour is somewhere between forty and sixty pounds. The dough would be far too much for one woman to knead on her own, and the yield would be far too much for one person to consume. The image is one of extravagance, or hyperbole. We might be reminded of many other New Testament images of food in abundance, from the wedding at Cana, with its sixty gallons of good wine (John 2.1–11), to the feeding of the five thousand, in which five loaves and two fish yielded twelve basketfuls of leftovers (e.g., Matt. 14–20).
We should also be reminded of the places in the scriptures of Israel where the phrase “three measures of flour” as well as cognate references appear. Genesis 18 locates Abraham sitting at the entrance to his tent “in the heat of the day.” He’s hot, he’s had to deal with the difficult relationship between his first wife, Sarah, and his other wife, Sarah’s slave Hagar, and he’s just completed not only his own circumcision, but also that of every male member in his household. It’s been a long week. Suddenly, Abraham looks up and sees “three men standing near him.” In classical Christian tradition, the three men represent the Trinity; in Jewish thought, they are God and two angels; for secular biblical scholars, the event probably never actually happened, but the story is of import.
Abraham, displaying the hospitality for which he will become famous, runs from his tent, prostrates himself before the strangers, and invites them to lunch. “Let me bring a little bread,” he tells them. Then he tells his wife, “Make ready quickly three measures of choice flour (Heb. kemach solet; Gk. semidalis), knead it, and make cakes” (Gen. 18.6). A little bread from three measures? Were my husband to run out into the street, invite three strangers to lunch, and then tell me to make sixty dozen biscuits, at least one of us would need counseling. Then again, given my culinary inabilities, he never would make such a request.
Not only do the three measures make a connection to our parable; so does the term for the “cakes.” The Hebrew term for “cake” is ugot, and there is nothing unusual about it. But the Septuagint translates the Hebrew as enkrypsias. The term, which refers to a cake that is baked on hot stones, is a cognate of our own enkrypto, save that instead of the Greek letter pi it uses the letter psi. The two words come from the same root. The connection between the parable and the passage from Genesis is secure.29
What the connection means, however, is another matter. The three visitors inform Abraham that his wife Sarah, who is well past menopause, will have a son. Sarah, overhearing the message, laughs to herself and thinks, “After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure”—despite centuries of modest interpretation that insists she is anticipating the joy of having a long-awaited child, Sarah is thinking of sexual pleasure. The term in Hebrew for “pleasure,” edna, is a cognate of the word Eden (the verse in question is Gen. 18.12, for which the best mnemonic device is to recall Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, in which the cannons go off and the earth moves).
Other possible references to “three measures of flour”—whether implicit or explicit—are less nourishing as intertexts, but they may also be used to garnish the parable. For example, a second possible but remote allusion appears in 1 Samuel 1.24. Here Hannah, who had finally conceived and given birth to Samuel, the son for whom she prayed, is prepared to dedicate her child to divine service. “When she had weaned him, she took him up with her, along with a three-year-old bull, an ephah of flour, and a skin of wine. She brought him to the house of the LORD at Shiloh.” An ephah, as biblical scholars usually note, is the equivalent of three “measures” (Heb. se’ah). Here the connection to our parable is through the combined mentions of the amount, the flour, and the woman. That the pericope is also about childbirth may, as we shall see, also have some bearing on how we see the parable functioning.
Another, more remote connection can be located in Judges 6. In this account, Gideon prepares a meal that includes not only a calf (recollecting the menu of Abraham’s meal in Gen. 18.7), but also an ephah of flour. However, Gideon’s cakes are unleavened; he did not have the time to allow the dough to rise. The context concerns Israel’s security against the larger, more powerful Midianite forces; the consuming of the meat and bread by a supernatural fire functions as a sign to Gideon that he will be able to deliver Israel, despite the fact that, as he states, “My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family” (6.15). The connection to the parable here is the theme of a small beginning yielding a major result.
We can now return to the parable, for now we have enough information to chew on.
Might the message be that we should reevaluate the meanest of domestic materials, that what we see as negative or simply utilitarian may have spiritual potential? The kingdom can be associated with pearls, but also with yeast, with banquets, but also with mustard seeds, with kings, but also with shepherds.
Or perhaps the parable might inspire us to think of the women in antiquity, who did much of the baking.30 If we think of leavened bread, we should also think of the people who maintained the sourdough starter, kneaded the bread, and watched it while it baked to be sure it did not burn.
To extend this possibility, perhaps the parable has something to do more specifically with women’s bodies. Back during the time of Homer, women’s bodies were analogized to the ground. Granted, the image of being plowed is not a pleasant one, but at least the view prevailed that women’s bodies, like the earth, nurtured the seed planted in them. By the time of Jesus, the imagery had changed. Women’s bodies now were compared to ovens, as in that charming expression still heard today, “She’s got a bun in the oven.” Ovens do not provide nutrients; they do not nurture; they are simply incubators.
And yet Genesis 18, underlying the parable of the Leaven, is a story about an unexpected, miraculous, mysterious pregnancy.31 The idea of hiding yeast and of the dough rising on its own can suggest insemination and then pregnancy. The idea that this parable hides an image of pregnancy and parturition is not just a feminist fantasy; it is supported as well by the common metaphor that associates pregnancy and childbirth with the messianic age. Second Esdras 4.39–40, in answer to the question about when the final judgment will occur, reads, “Go and ask a pregnant woman whether, when her nine months have been completed, her womb can keep the fetus within her any longer.” In Romans 8.22, Paul draws upon the same image: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now.” Perhaps the parable tells us that, like dough that has been carefully prepared with sourdough starter or a child growing in the womb, the kingdom will come if we nurture it.
Lest readers conclude that my feminist inclinations or my hormones are seeing pregnancy where there is none, I offer one more possible intertext. The Babylonian Talmud, Ketubot 10b, reads, “As the leaven is wholesome for the dough, so is blood wholesome for a woman. And one has [also] taught in the name of Rabbi Meir, Every woman who has abundant blood has many children.”32
Or, to change the subject, given the enormous yield that would result from forty to sixty pounds of flour, perhaps the parable speaks to the importance of extravagance and generosity. Perhaps it suggests we adapt our lives in light of the kingdom and do something that might seem foolish or wasteful to people on the outside. Imagine inviting three strangers to lunch. Imagine setting up a food pantry that stocks more than one family could eat. Imagine baking bread for those who have none and who wonder about all those well-fed folks who pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.”
I did hear one wag suggest that the parable proclaimed the kingdom of heaven to be present when women were in the kitchen, barefoot, pregnant, and baking. One could, conceivably, adopt this view. The Mishnah (Ketubot 5.5) does prescribe bread making as one of the seven forms of labor the wife is to perform for her husband along with grinding flour, doing the laundry, cooking, feeding the children, making the bed, and working in wool. It is, however, unlikely. This woman is doing something cryptically rather than in an up-front manner that can be controlled; she’s going to produce more bread than a single person can eat; she might even be in the position to determine who gets the bread. Jesus asks his disciples, “Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone?” (Matt. 7.9). With this fellow, perhaps stone soup might be on the menu.
Or finally, perhaps the parable tells us that despite all our images of golden slippers and harps and halos, the kingdom is present at the communal oven of a Galilean village when everyone has enough to eat. It is present, inchoate, in everything, and it is available to all, from the sourdough starter to the rain and the sunshine. It is something that works its way through our lives, and we realize its import only when we do not have it. To clean out the old leaven allows us to make room for the new, to start again, and again to feast.