Wafer

The wafer is a thin, unleavened item of bread that recurs in the offerings, in priestly ordination, in the Nazirite ritual, and once as a comparison for the taste of manna. The texts treat it as a baked piece of fine flour, anointed with oil, drawn from a basket of unleavened bread set before Yahweh.

The Taste of Manna

The first comparison reaches outside the sacrificial system. When the people gather the strange bread that falls in the wilderness, the narrator measures its flavour by the kind of bread the reader already knows: "And the house of Israel called its name Manna: and it was like coriander seed, white; and the taste of it was like wafers [made] with honey" (Ex 16:31). Wafers with honey furnish the closest familiar taste for what the wilderness has produced.

In the Meal-Offering

The unleavened wafer is one of the standard forms of the meal-offering. The instruction in Leviticus permits two shapes of baked offering: "And when you offer an oblation of a meal-offering baked in the oven, it will be unleavened cakes of fine flour mingled with oil, or unleavened wafers anointed with oil" (Lev 2:4). The cake is kneaded with the oil; the wafer is anointed on the surface — two ways of bringing oil and fine flour together at the altar.

In the Aaronic Ordination

When Aaron and his sons are consecrated, the same triple of items — unleavened bread, oiled cakes, and anointed wafers — is prepared together: "and unleavened bread, and unleavened cakes mingled with oil, and unleavened wafers anointed with oil: of fine wheat flour you will make them" (Ex 29:2). At the consecration itself, one of each is taken out of the basket: "and one loaf of bread, and one cake of oiled bread, and one wafer, out of the basket of unleavened bread that is before Yahweh" (Ex 29:23). The execution of the rite by Moses repeats the same gesture: "and out of the basket of unleavened bread, that was before Yahweh, he took one unleavened cake, and one cake of oiled bread, and one wafer, and placed them on the fat, and on the right thigh:" (Lev 8:26).

In the Nazirite Ritual

The Nazirite who completes his vow brings the same kind of basket. Among the items he supplies are "cakes of fine flour mingled with oil, and unleavened wafers anointed with oil, and their meal-offering, and their drink-offerings," (Num 6:15). At the close of the rite the priest lifts a wafer from that basket and lays it in the man's hands: "And the priest will take the boiled shoulder of the ram, and one unleavened cake out of the basket, and one unleavened wafer, and will put them on the hands of the Nazirite, after he has shaven [the head of] his separation;" (Num 6:19). The wafer marks the transition from the period of separation back into ordinary life.