Manna from Heaven

And when the dew that lay was gone up, behold, upon the face of the wilderness there lay a small round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground.
And when the children of Israel saw it, they said one to another, It is manna: for they wist not what it was. And Moses said unto them, This is the bread which the Lord hath given you to eat.

-- Exodus 16: 14-15 (KJV)

After the Israelites have complained long and hard about the scarcity of food in the wilderness, Yahweh promises to "rain bread from heaven" upon them (Exodus 16: 4) and even throws quail meat into the bargain. The birds he delivers are the standard variety, but the bread is like nothing they've ever seen. "What is it?" they ask one another -- "Man hu?" in Hebrew -- and thus, by their puzzlement, they name the bread man.

But the Israelites are puzzled only because they've been cooped up in Egypt too long. Manna -- known as mann to this day -- is a delicious, sugary derivative of the tamarisk bush, native to the Sinai peninsula. Knowing how it's produced, however, may blunt your appetite. Manna is a crystallized form of tamarisk sap, excreted in drops (like honeydew) by insects. It falls from the bushes in the morning, thus symbolically "raining from heaven." Being round, white, and flaky, this manna does indeed have the appearance of hoarfrost (verse 14).

The Israelites aren't much interested in finding out how God produced this miracle. They had better things to do -- like gather up the manna before ants got to it and think up new complaints against Moses.

 
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Michael Macrone is Associate Site Producer of GraceCom and the author of nine books on language, literature, and ideas, including the best-selling Brush Up Your Shakespeare!