With the dough the Israelites had brought from Egypt, they baked loaves of unleavened bread. The dough was without yeast because they had been driven out of Egypt and did not have time to prepare food for themselves.
Occasionally God will present me with the same message over and over. That is happening now with bread and leaven (or yeast). Did you know commercially produced yeast is only a 150 or so years old. Before this people just mixed flour and water, let it sit out and miraculously it would ferment and would cause a loaf of bread to rise.
We don't know when or how the first leavened bread occurred; only that the first records of any sort of bread are in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Possibly one day a mixture of flour meal and water was left longer than usual on a warm day and the yeasts that occur in natural contaminants of the flour - or even in milk that may have been added for flavour - began to ferment before baking. The resulting bread would have been lighter and more tasty than the normal flat, hard cake. http://h2g2.com/approved_entry/A2791820
Leaven is just in the air. It is carried on the skin of fruit, but it is pretty much everywhere. You just have to capture it. Starting sourdough is essentially the same process as making beer or wine. It's all about the fermentation and time.
The Passover was a time of speedy departure, thus there was no time to allow for the fermentation required for leavened bread. The Israelites likely learned this technique from the Egyptians. Possibly this is another reason for them to rid themselves of any "sourdough starters" aka leaven. I believe removing the leaven by cleaning as a Jewish tradition is more symbolic than literal because leaven is a live micro-organism which can not be simply wiped away. It is like sin. It exists and if we simply sit there, sin will invade our hearts and minds. We must keep moving and be vigilant in keeping the spores cleared away.
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