Cake

Cakes made of wheat or barley were offered in the temple. They were salted, but unleavened (Exod 29:2; Lev 2:4). In idolatrous worship thin cakes or wafers were offered “to the queen of heaven” (Jer 7:18; 44:19).

Pancakes are described in 2 Sam 13:8, 9. Cakes mingled with oil and baked in the oven are mentioned in Lev 2:4, and “wafers unleavened anointed with oil,” in Exod 29:2; Lev 8:26; 1 Chr 23:29. “Cracknels,” a kind of crisp cakes, were among the things Jeroboam directed his wife to take with her when she went to consult Ahijah the prophet at Shiloh (1 Kgs 14:3). Such hard cakes were carried by the Gibeonites when they came to Joshua (9:5, 12). They described their bread as “mouldy;” but the Hebrew word nikuddim, here used, ought rather to be rendered “hard as biscuit.” It is rendered “cracknels” in 1 Kgs 14:3. The ordinary bread, when kept for a few days, became dry and excessively hard. The Gibeonites pointed to this hardness of their bread as an evidence that they had come a long journey.

We read also of honey-cakes (Exod 16:31), “cakes of figs” (1 Sam 25:18), “cake” as denoting a whole piece of bread (1 Kgs 17:12), and “a [round] cake of barley bread” (Judg 7:13). In Lev 2 is a list of the different kinds of bread and cakes which were fit for offerings.