Holy Hormones Bible Study: Teaching — not Entertainment

Preparation and cooking of the protein

FEAST OF UNLEAVENED BREAD #8

Brad Banardict

Published in

The Dove

4 min readFeb 17, 2023

Disclosure: I’m not a Messianic. I’m an NT Saint who has been exposed to my OT Heritage.

This post continues the rag-tag series on the closer examination of some of the aspects of the Passover/Last Supper. If you have come in part-way through the series, there is some explanation in the earlier episodes to be found in FEAST OF UNLEAVENED BREAD

This particular post is presented only in the interests of completeness to provide a fuller picture. The take-home is that the whole process on the Day of Preparation, 14th Nisan, would take about 4½ hours (go-to-whoa) so could not have been completed if started too close to sunset.

Instructions from Yehovah

The detailed instructions for the Passover meal are given by God in Exodus 12:1–11

The skeleton of the instructions: -

The month of Nisan/Abib, the 7th month of the Agricultural year is ordained as the 1st month. This gives Israel two types of years (Agricultural and Religious) running concurrently but seven months out of phase with the Agricultural leading. From this time on, the Bible student must be careful about which year is being spoken of as the Narrative progresses.
For every family a blemish-free yearling male lamb/kid is selected on the 10th Nisan and kept as a pet in the house until the 14th Nisan. (There are stipulated requirements about the size of the family and what must be done with any left-over meat.
On 14th Nisan, in the afternoon (ref: FEAST OF UNLEAVENED BREAD #7), every family is to slaughter the lamb, dress it, and roast it — definitely NOT boil it.
Blood of the sacrifice is to be painted on the two doorposts.
The cooked flesh is to be eaten that night (15th Nisan).
Everyone is to be dressed and prepared ready to move when the sun comes up.
That night, 15th Nisan, The Destroyer would traverse Egypt and kill the eldest child in the houses which do not show the blood on the doorposts.

The House

Bringing the lamb into the house does not mean it would get the bridal suite, as shown in Figure 8–1. Why must it be brought into the house? I don’t know. Perhaps to become a family pet so there would be some remorse when it had to be slaughtered. A model for the remorse between the Father and the Son when the time came.

Figure 8–1: Common house layout in Biblical times

The breed of lamb

The Awassi is Israel’s native sheep breed,1 as shown in Figure 8–2 It is a fat-tailed sheep which is specified by God in Exodus 29:22 || “Also you shall take the fat of the ram, the fat tail, the fat that covers the entrails, the fatty lobe attached to the liver, the two kidneys and the fat on them …”

Figure 8–2: Fat-tailed Awassi sheep

Size of the lamb

Selective breeding has increased the size of Awassi lambs since the establishment of the modern state of Israel, so they cannot be used for Biblical estimations. The average weight of 56 yearlings, recorded in Palestine in 1930, is the nearest specimen weight available. It was 34.6 kg,2 say 30–40 kg. PGG Wrightson Limited, a major New Zealand agricultural supply company, provides guidelines for the dressed carcass weight (meat, fat, bones) of such lambs would be 13–18 kg.3

Dressing of the lamb for cooking

Preparation

According to the self-sufficiency website, The Elliot Homestead,4 there are three major steps in dressing a live lamb for cooking for a Passover meal.

Killing/bleeding/hanging the lamb.
Skinning the lamb. (Surprisingly, this is very important and will have its own post.)
Disembowelment
Cooking

Cooking method

It is open to correction but it seems that the best way to cook the carcass would be on a spit. It is the personal experience of this author that, using a modern gas rotisserie (with a hood), would require 3–4 hours for a fully dressed lamb. It is guestimated that the extra time for the rinsed innards would take about ½ hour.

The other items on the menu could be prepared while cooking carried on.

Duration of preparing the lamb fit for purpose to eat

From the best information available, it would take about 4½ hours to slaughter, dress and cook the lamb on 14th Nisan. This means the meal is not prepared at evening.

What will come in next post?

The next post will not be the last post but it will be controversial so you had better have a cup of tea, an aspirin, and a good lie down before reading it. It deals with the skinning of the Passover Lamb.

The forgoing evidence has not been presented to convince any reader but to allow a personal decision to be made. There is much more to know about this subject. Perhaps you’ll pay another visit, sometime.

All Glory to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

(We all have a plank in our eye. It’s bigger than we think.)