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Sunday, April 24, 2016

Food For 400 Years of Slavery and 40 Years of Getting Back Home

Nadene Goldfoot                                                                              
Slaves carrying bread and other things

The Egyptians ate a low-fat, high-fiber diet with a lot of grains. They ate a variety of plant oils and fats, bread, milk, lentils, cottage cheese, cakes, onions, meat, dates, melons, milk products, figs, ostrich eggs, almonds, peas, beans, olives, pomegranates, grapes, vegetables, honey, garlic and other foods. The Egyptians ate a variety of grains, including barley and emmer-wheat.
                                                                                      
Bakery and Brewery
Slaves must have been used to produce food for all.
Israelite slaves were not used to build pyramids, but for storage cities.  

Barley was used for making beer. Emmer wheat was used to make bread. Lentils were discovered in an Egyptian tomb dating back to 2000 B.CE, when Abraham lived.   Israelites went into Egypt in c1641 BCE.   Moses was born in 1321 BCE.   The principal difference between the wild and the domestic species is that the ripened seed head of the wild species shatters and spreads the seed onto the ground,  while in the domesticated emmer the seed head remains intact, thus making it easier for humans to harvest the grain.
Along with Einkorn wheat, Emmer was one of the first crops domesticated in the Near East. It was widely cultivated in the ancient world, but is now a relict crop in mountainous regions of Europe and Asia. 

Harvest time was from April to June before the Nile River flooded from June to October.  The flooding nourished the soil again.  Possibly the Exodus happened right after harvesting in April (Nisan 15).                                                    
Spikes of cultivated Emmer wheat  
Emmer is a tetraploid (2n=4x=28 chromosomes)
References to candy date back to 2000 BCE.  Images in
tombs from the 11th dynasty depict confectionery processing
taking place in temples.  The treats were offered to the gods
or reserved for noblemen. 
                                                       
Wheat before harvesting

Emmer wheat was a twin-kerneled form of grain that is very difficult to husk. Hieroglyphics have recorded 14 types of bread, including sourdough and whole wheat breads. Scholars speculate that families usually ate unleavened pita-style bread at home and ate pot-baked breads during temple festivals and special occasions.

"Humans have always used yeast, well before writing was invented. Egyptians used it to make bread some five thousand years ago. However, they ignored the yeast  fermentation process and they believed this chemical reaction to be a miracle.  Bread was born the day that man realized that, with naturally fermented dough, bread could rise and its flavour and texture improved."

Tiny in size, but a nutrient-rich powerhouse, wheat “germ” (short for germination) is the part of wheat that sprouts and grows into a new plant. Despite being the most vitamin- and mineral-rich part of the wheat kernel, it's left out when wheat is processed into white flour.

Fatty acids of the wheat germ  react from the moment they are exposed to oxygen. This occurs when grain is milled; the fatty acids oxidize and flour starts to become rancid.  Therefore, man had a hard time reaping and keep wheat grain to feed their people.  As vitaminsmicronutrients and amino acids were completely or relatively unknown in the late 19th century CE (1890s) . 

That has been 3,281 years since Moses was born that man had eaten bread with the wheat germ and able to get all the vitamins needed.   Removing the germ was an effective solution for storage. Without the germ, flour cannot become rancid.  De-germed flour became standard. Now, some people buy wheat germ to add nutrients to their flour.  A popular bread in Portland is "Dave's Killer Bread" that has hit the market with all organic products, and lots of seeds.  One thinned sliced bread is only 60 calories per slice and most healthy.  It's made with 21 whole grains.  



Pilgrims at Ply                                               
Mayflower-1620 with 102 passengers and about
30 crew members.  Today their descendants are 
special people with an amazing history:   Mr. John Carver; Katherine,
his wife, Desire Minter; and 2 manservants, John Howland, Roger Wilder; William Latham,
a boy; and a maid servant, and a child that was put to him, called Jasper More. ...

In 1620, the ship, The Mayflower, landed at Plymouth Rock in the New World of America with 102 people called Pilgrims from England via Holland, which was 396 years ago. On board must have been hardtack to eat.  "This meant that all their food was dried or salted. The foods that the Pilgrims ate on the ship included salted meat, salted fish, dried beans, dried peas, hardtack (unleavened bread) , and hard cheese. During the journey, the Pilgrims' water supply went bad, so they all had to drink beer instead—even the children.  Today The United States of America is home to about 322,762,018 million people.  There has been a tremendous change in people and their history  during these past 400 years.  The Israelites also had been living in Egypt for 400 years.  Imagine the change with their descendants only knowing slavery.  
                       
Irish Americans 2016-400 years later
Dined on non-bran bleached white bread in their childhood, 

Terah, father of
Abraham
                                                                 
Abraham, born in Ur of Chaldees, (Iraq) in
2nd Millennium BCE (1948 BCE) 
Abraham and Sarah lived in Ur in c 2,000 BCE, today's Iraq and their  grandson, Jacob-later named Israel,  entered Egypt with 70 family members  when they were faced with a terrible drought in their land of Canaan and wound up being held in Egypt for 400 years.  After living there for a while, they were all taken as slaves as they had multiplied and frightened the Egyptians with their numbers and could not escape until Moses, their 3rd great grandson, had  led them away from bondage on a trek that lasted for 40 years back to Canaan, which became Israel later.  Moses lived from 1391 to 1271 BCE, dying at age 120.  
                                                                      
Ramses, Pharaoh of Egypt
d: 1213 BCE


                            
Israelites entering Egypt during drought
c2000 BCE
Exodus 1334-1325 for the next 40 years
Egypt's Early Dynastic Period of pharaohs was from
3686 BCE to 2686 BCE.  

Mankind was from Africa originally, and have been moving Westward ever since, following the sun.  Africa was a varied as possible with jungles and dry deserts, with most people moving out from the northern desert area of Egypt. 

 Abraham's people left the land of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers of Assyria in Western Asia  which had established an aggressive kingdom by the 20th century BCE already  and they  had trekked Westward to Canaan and settled there among the Canaanite and Philistine people.  The rivers were regarded as 2 of the 4 rivers emerging from the Garden of Eden. From sources in the Taurus mountains of eastern Turkey they flow by/through Syria through Iraq into the Persian Gulf. The lower part was called Mesopotamia.  The rivers have cut deep and permanent beds in the rock, so that their courses have undergone only minor changes since prehistoric times. Along the northeastern edge of Al-Jazīrah, the Tigris drains the rain-fed heart of ancient Assyria, while along the southwestern limit the Euphrates crosses true desert. On the Tigris river was Mahoza, one of the major Jewish Babylonian settlements in the Talmudic Period (Babylon  attack-597-586 BCE).  
Evidence of Israelite Slavery in Egypt

Hebrew captive, from the region of Sinai.
Part of a mural from the Funerary Temple of Ramesses III,
found at Medinet Habu.  The eyes and high cheekbones
look quite Asian to me.  
The 40 year trek started off with the slaves being told to hurry, for they were leaving, and 600 thousand had to rush in order to take advantage of the Pharaoh's judgment of allowing them all to leave, which made up the whole workforce of Egypt.  All slaves followed Moses West to Canaan, not knowing how long it would take to arrive to their new destination.  Old and young would have only a short few hours to prepare food for the march, and not time was allowed to bake bread, so they mixed up flour and water and baked this in the sun, creating the first matzos.                                                                               
matzos-flour and water -unleavened bread
Exodus, sometime between 1579 BCE to 1300 BCE ;
about 3500 years ago.  
                                                                            
hardtack-flour, water, salt
 They were something like hardtack, a cracker that lasted for years used by American pioneers.  it was and is used for sustenance in the absence of perishable foods, commonly during long sea voyages, land migrations, and military campaigns.  It was also a mixture of flour and water and sometimes included salt.    

 "The introduction of the baking of processed cereals, including the creation of flour, provided a more reliable source of food. It's been around since the Egyptian pharaohs.  
                                                                          

It is probable that wild grasses were part of our ancestors’ diet at an early stage, but the real nutritional revolution did not take place until the last Ice Age had passed its peak. 13,000 years ago the hunters and gatherers of the Natufian culture of the Mesolithic period roamed a fertile region that extended from the Middle East into Mesopotamia  The advent of agriculture changed the lives of the people. The Nomads started to settle, built villages and kept cattle. But even in the advanced civilizations the grains were still ground by hand between simple grindstones.  
                                                                                      

We know that by the 11th Century BCE in Israel after the Exodus, Samson, a judge of Israel, was seized by the Philistines and when imprisoned was made to grind grain, probably by being tethered to the grinding stone.  More likely this job was for oxen. (Judg 16: 21)

Egyptian sailors carried a flat brittle loaf of millet bread called dhourra cake, while the Romans had a biscuit called bucellatum.  King Richard I of England left for the Third Crusade (1189–92) with "biskit of muslin", which was a mixed grain compound of barley, bean flour, and rye.  In 1588, the daily allowance on board a Royal Navy ship was one pound of biscuits plus one gallon of beer.  In 1801, Josiah Bent began a baking operation in Milton, Massachusetts, selling "water crackers" or biscuits made of flour and water that would not deteriorate during long sea voyages from the port of Boston, which was also used extensively as a source of food by the gold prospectors who migrated to the gold mines of California in 1849. Since the journey took months, pilot bread (the unleavened bread) , which could be kept a long time, was stored in the wagon trains. Bent's company later sold the original hardtack crackers used by troops during the American Civil War. "Nobody remembered  that it was made like the Matzos of the people of the Exodus.  
                                                                                   
Picking manna every morning
I wonder if manna wasn't a type of mushroom. "It was like coriander seed,
it was white, and it tasted like a cake fried in honey...The people would stroll and gather it, and grind it in a mill or pound it in a mortar and cook it in a pot or make it into cakes, and it tasted like the taste of dough kneaded with oil.....
Mushrooms, crimini
As a part of their meals, Crimini mushrooms could have offered great
 nutritional value. However, the nutritional value of crimini mushrooms may surprise you. One cup of crimini mushrooms provides a good, very good, or excellent source of 15 different vitamins, minerals, and antioxidant phytonutrients.  Along with birds caught, they would have been
very healthy.  4,000 years ago, they could have been as large as a loaf
of bread.  
It wasn't long when our 40 year Exodus marchers were fed Manna from heaven, something that appeared on the ground every morning  and were directed to pick up a double portion every Friday and then it disappeared each day for the rest of the 40 years that kept everyone nutritiously fed.  It was thin and rough, white in color, and tasted like honey-cakes.  It was formerly believed to be a shallow-rooted plant carried by storms.  Modern botanists have discovered sugary secretions on the tamaris mammifera caused by insects.  

People complained on their trek of missing onions to eat that they enjoyed as slaves in Egypt, and thought they should go back. "Who will feed us meat?  We remember the fish that we ate in Egypt free of charge;  the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic.  But now, our life is parched, there is nothing;  we have nothing to anticipate but manna!"  

 Manna and that was it must have been pretty boring, all right, but filling. " There (in Egypt)  we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death." 


"11 The Lord said to Moses, 12 “I have heard the grumbling of the Israelites. Tell them, ‘At twilight you will eat meat, and in the morning you will be filled with bread. Then you will know that I am the Lord your God.’”
13 That evening quail (a wild bird)  came and covered the camp, and in the morning there was a layer of dew around the camp. 14 When the dew was gone, thin flakes like frost on the ground appeared on the desert floor. 15 When the Israelites saw it, they said to each other, “What is it?” For they did not know what it was, " and it turned out to be the Manna.  

Resource: http://factsanddetails.com/world/cat56/sub365/item1940.html Egyptian food
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardtack.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+16
http://www.britannica.com/place/Tigris-Euphrates-river-system
w.art-and-flour.de/english/history.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flour
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Egypt
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Who-was-the-pharaoh-of-the-Exodus-395885
http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=97
http://www.zaqen.info/evidence.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matzo
Exodus 16.3
Numbers11:4-6
http://classroom.synonym.com/harvesting-ancient-egypt-8915.html
http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/timelines/topics/harvesting_grain.htm  and
  The Grain harvest

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