When partaking of a Passover meal, one might assume that matzoh, the unleavened bread so identified with the Passover seder, was invented on the original Passover night in ancient Egypt, when the Israelites were expelled so suddenly that they didn’t have time to knead yeast into their dough.

But unleavened bread made its first appearance in the Bible centuries earlier, in the meal Abraham’s nephew, Lot, made for the angels of God on their fateful visit to Sodom (Genesis 19:3). This bread was likewise baked in haste, as it was during the later exodus from Egypt. The angels’ visit had been sudden too, leaving no time for dough to rise.

Lot’s bread was also Exodus bread. His household and guests ate it shortly before his forced flight at the hands (literally) of his guests—the angels of death who would visit greater desolation on Sodom’s precincts than Egypt would ever see.

Lot had escaped the decadence of Ur with his uncle Abraham (see Thomas Cahill’s intriguing The Gifts of the Jews, but be prepared for a lurid review of Chaldean culture). Separating from Abraham in Canaan, Lot chose the nearest city—still more corrupted than Ur—for his domicile. Though its rot vexed him (2 Pet 2:8), he invested himself so much there that he sat in Sodom’s city gate. Lot’s dogged, unseemly reluctance to flee and save his family testifies of its spell over him.

Like the Israelites in Egypt, Lot too was a slave—but he was bound in a form of servitude more potent than that imposed by tyrants. While Abraham embraced God at His call and conclusively abandoned Ur’s allures, Lot craved the familiar, compromised society he never really left. Even when Sodom’s evil ripened to demand annihilation, he could not be torn from it, except by overruling divine force.

Lot had to be dragged out of Sodom to escape its destruction, whereas before their Exodus from Egypt, God’s people were already preparing to leave. “These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the culmination of the ages has come.” (1 Cor 10:11) Let us be like the Israelites—purposefully and decisively leaving behind slavish service to sin and traditions, rather than like Lot, clinging to a familiar but disintegrating world.

You were redeemed with a price; do not become slaves of men.
(1 Corinthians 7:23, LITV)

May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.
(Galatians 6:14, NIV)