"On the fifteenth day of the same month is the Chag HaMatzot to YHWH. Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread." Vayikra 23:6 · KWS
The Torah Mitzvah
The fifteenth through the twenty-first of the first month.
Immediately after Pesach, the seven-day Chag HaMatzot begins Vayikra 23:6–8. For one week, no leaven (chametz) is to be in the house. The first day and the seventh day are kodesh convocations — work-rest days. "Whoever eats that which is leavened, that soul shall be cut off from the congregation of Israel" Shemot 12:19 The instruction is severe because the symbolism is total.
The Scripture Observance
Search the house. Burn the leaven. Eat the matzah.
Leaven (yeast, sourdough, anything that puffs up grain) is removed from the household before the feast begins. The traditional bedikat chametz — a candle-lit search through every cabinet and crevice — preserves a posture: the cleansing has to be deliberate, room by room, hidden corner by hidden corner.
The matzah eaten through the seven days is "the bread of affliction" Devarim 16:3 — flat, hurried, ungilded — eaten in remembrance of leaving Egypt with no time for the dough to rise. Bread under pressure, bread of urgency, bread of deliverance.
"I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will not be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty." Yochanan 6:35 · KWS
Yeshua in the Feast
The Bread of Life. The body without leaven. The unbroken Lamb.
"Christmas" is not commanded here. December 25 is not commanded anywhere.
What the Institutional Church Did
Lent for forty days; Unleavened Bread for none.
The institutional church kept neither the seven days of Unleavened Bread nor the Pesach. In their place it built Lent — a forty-day pre-Easter period of fasting and abstinence with no command in Scripture, on a date untethered from YHWH's calendar. The matzah was replaced with leavened communion wafers, breaking the very symbolism Yeshua intended His meal to preserve.