Exodus 16 Bible study: Bread from the sky

Israel left Egypt "on the fifteenth day of the first month" (Numbers 33:3). They reach the wilderness of Sin "on the fifteenth day of the second month after their departing out of the land of Egypt" (16:1): one month on. Before that, after three days in the wilderness without water, they had murmured over the bitter water at Marah (15:22-24). Now "the whole congregation of the children of Israel murmured against Moses and against Aaron" (16:2): "We wish that we had died by the LORD’s hand in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the meat pots, when we ate our fill of bread" (16:3). The LORD's answer is food, not punishment: "I have heard the murmurings of the children of Israel. Speak to them, saying, ‘At evening you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall be filled with bread. Then you will know that I am the LORD your God.’" (16:12).

Exodus 16:4→leads toJohn 6:35

The LORD said, "I will rain bread from the sky for you" (16:4), and "The children of Israel ate the manna forty years" (16:35). In John 6 a crowd reminded Jesus, "Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness" (John 6:31). Jesus answered, "it wasn’t Moses who gave you the bread out of heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread out of heaven" (John 6:32), and "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will not be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty" (John 6:35). He set himself beside the manna: "Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness and they died. This is the bread which comes down out of heaven, that anyone may eat of it and not die" (John 6:49-50). "I am the living bread which came down out of heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever" (John 6:51).

מָןmansay MAHN

When they first saw it, the people said to one another man hu, which the WEB translates "What is it?", "For they didn’t know what it was" (16:15). Then "The house of Israel called its name ‘Manna’" (16:31): in Hebrew the name is the same word, man. Brown-Driver-Briggs reads the words in 16:15 as "most prob. ‘What is it?’ the question being intended as a popular etym. of מָן ‘manna’". Strong's: "literally a whatness (so to speak), i.e. manna (so called from the question about it)". The same verse also has the usual Hebrew word for "what", mah: "they didn’t know what it was" (16:15). Outside Exodus the Hebrew Bible names the manna in Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Nehemiah and the Psalms.