Author: Erica X Eisen / Source: Atlas Obscura
When the Israelites escape the pharaoh’s army in the Book of Exodus, they are left to wander the desert, half-starving. What is the point of leaving Egypt, they ask themselves, only to perish from hunger in the wilderness?
Could dying in freedom really be preferable to living in chains? According to the text, God addresses Moses during this discord, telling him, “Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you.” The next day, “upon the face of the wilderness there lay a small round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground.”Manna, the heaven-sent food said to have sustained the Israelites for 40 years, has long captured the imagination of scholars, soldiers, and scientists alike. Many have mined biblical verses for clues about the Old Testament substance. Adding to the puzzle are the other descriptions of the food in the Bible: on hot days, manna melted in the sun. If not gathered quickly enough, it rotted and bred worms. In Exodus, it’s referred to as “like coriander seed, white,” with a taste “like wafers made with honey.” Numbers, on the other hand, likens the flavor to “fresh oil” and describes how the Israelites “ground it in mills, or beat it in a mortar, and baked it in pans, and made cakes of it.”
In addition to this list of traits and possible culinary applications, manna also had seemingly supernatural qualities as well. It spontaneously regenerated each morning, even in convenient double quantities on the day before the sabbath.
According to the Jewish mystical treatise known as the Zohar, the consumption of manna imparted sacred knowledge of the divine. Another Jewish text, The Book of Wisdom, even claims that the flavor of manna magically changed according to the tastes of the person who ate it.
Commentary on manna is not exclusive to the Jewish tradition. In the New Testament, manna is mentioned in both the Gospel of John and the Book of Revelation. In a sermon delivered shortly after the Feeding of the Five Thousand, Jesus compares God’s gift of body-nourishing manna to his own ability to eternally nourish the soul: “I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever.” References to manna are also present in Islamic texts: one Hadith passage has the prophet Muhammad likening desert truffles to manna.
Moses and his followers were apparently befuddled by their strange foodstuff. Exodus relates that they “wist [knew] not what it was” that they were eating. As for what the Israelites said upon first beholding their heavenly sustenance, translators and scholars are deeply divided. The King James Bible renders the phrase “man hu” as “this is manna.” Others parse the Israelites’…
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