The Bread of Affliction: Daily Exodus Memory

Thou Shalt Eat No Leavened Bread

Deuteronomy 16:3 does more than regulate the Passover diet. The unleavened bread — called 'the bread of affliction' — is a mnemonic device. Eaten in haste because the night of the Exodus allowed no time to let dough rise, the matzah carries the texture and urgency of that night into every Passover meal. The command 'that thou mayest remember' extends to 'all the days of thy life' — the rabbis derived from this that the Exodus must be recalled every single day, not only at Passover.

The companion verse at Exodus 13:3 records Moses telling the people on the very morning of the departure: 'Remember this day, in which ye came out from Egypt, out of the house of bondage; for by strength of hand the LORD brought you out from this place.' Two texts — one at the departure, one forty years later in Deuteronomy — bracket the wilderness with the same instruction: remember. Maimonides counts this daily remembrance as Positive Commandment #157 in his Sefer HaMitzvot, anchored in Deuteronomy 16:3.

Remember This Day

The phrase 'out of the house of bondage' appears here for the first time in Scripture. Exodus 13:3 is not the first mention of Egypt, but it is the first time Egypt is described from the vantage point of those who have just escaped it. The phrase will become a refrain — repeated in the Decalogue at Exodus 20:2 and again in the Deuteronomy version at Deuteronomy 5:6 — as though the law itself remembers the event every time it introduces a new obligation.

The New Month commandment at Exodus 12:2 — which fixes the month of the Exodus as the first month of Israel's year — is the structural expression of this same memory. If the Exodus must be recalled 'all the days of thy life,' the calendar itself is redesigned around it.

Key Figures

Study Questions