The Manna That Vanished Into the Limbs of Israel

The Night Heaven and Earth Traded Places

For as long as anyone in the camp could remember, the world had worked one way. Bread rose from the earth. A farmer broke the ground, scattered seed, waited through rain and heat, and the earth pushed grain up toward the sky. Dew came down from above, settling cold on the tents before dawn (Deuteronomy 33:28). Earth gave bread. Heaven gave dew. That was the order of creation, fixed since the beginning.

Then Israel walked into a wilderness where the order broke. So beloved were they before the Holy One that He reversed it for their sake. He turned the terrestrial celestial and the celestial terrestrial. He opened His goodly treasure trove, the heavens (Deuteronomy 28:12), and bread began to fall from the sky. "Behold, I shall rain down bread for you from the heavens" (Exodus 16:4). And the dew, which had always fallen, now rose. In the gray hour before sunrise the dew layer ascended from the ground (Exodus 16:14), lifting like a curtain, and underneath it lay the manna, fine and white on the open desert floor.

They did not gather it in their courtyards. They went out into the wilderness for it, out past the last tent ropes, into the empty land, and the bread was waiting there for them.

They Ate Like Horses

The first time, there was no dignity in it. A nation that had marched out of Egypt on hard rations, that had tasted dust and thirst and the dry crack of fear, came upon food lying free on the ground. They dropped to their knees. They stuffed their mouths. They ate the way horses eat after drought, heads down, jaws working, gorging without restraint, without pause, without thought.

Hands grabbed. Throats swallowed. The camp filled with the sound of a starving people eating their fill for the first time in living memory. Whatever the bread was, wherever it had come from, it went down by the fistful.

The Bread That Left Nothing Behind

But the manna was not what they thought it was, and the eating was only the beginning of the strangeness.

Ordinary bread makes demands. The body takes what it can use and casts out the rest. That is the tax every meal pays, the residue, the waste, the part of food that was never really food. The manna paid no tax. It went into the mouth, down the throat, and then it simply ceased to be separate from the one who ate it. Nothing was expelled. Nothing was left over. Every particle of it was drawn into the body and became the body, as if the bread had always belonged to their flesh and was only returning home.

The song of Israel remembers it in a single charged word. "Each man ate the bread of abirim" (Psalms 78:25). Abirim, the mighty ones, the bread of angels, food from the tables of heaven. But the letters of that word hold a second reading. Sound them differently and abirim becomes eivarim, limbs. Not only the bread of the mighty ones. The bread of limbs. Bread so pure, so perfectly fitted to the human frame, that it was absorbed straight into the limbs of those who ate it and vanished there. The people who had gorged like animals were carrying angels' food in their arms and legs, dissolved into muscle and bone, and they walked the wilderness with heaven worked into their bodies.

The Manna That Fell on Joshua

For one man the bread came closer still. "He sent them sustenance to satiety" (Psalms 78:25), and that word "them" points past the crowd to a single figure, Joshua son of Nun, the servant of Moses, the young man who never left the Tent of Meeting (Exodus 33:11). While the rest of the nation slept, Joshua kept his post at the tent. While the rest went out at dawn to stoop and gather, the manna descended for Joshua over and against all of Israel, a portion set apart.

And some told it more boldly than that. For Joshua, they said, the bread did not fall to the ground at all. It came down onto his own limbs. He woke to find his portion resting on his body, on the very arms and legs the manna was destined to enter, and from his own limbs he took it and ate. The bread of eivarim, delivered to the eivarim themselves. The man who would one day carry Israel across the Jordan was fed skin to skin by heaven.

Jeremiah Lifts the Jar

Generations passed. The wilderness closed behind Israel, the land opened before them, and the manna stopped falling. But one jar of it had been laid up by Aaron and kept, and it did not spoil, and it waited.

Centuries later the prophet Jeremiah stood before a people who had let the Torah fall from their hands. Their excuse was practical. How shall we leave our work and study? How will we feed ourselves? Jeremiah did not argue. He brought out the flask of manna, the same jar from the desert, and he raised it before their eyes. "O generation, see the word of the Lord" (Jeremiah 2:31). See it. Your fathers stood in a wasteland with no field, no vineyard, no market, nothing but sand, and they gave themselves to Torah, and every morning the sky fed them. The One who rained bread on a desert can feed you in a land of grain and wine.

The jar in the prophet's hands held more than old bread. It held the memory of a people whose food had become their flesh, proof you could lift up and look at, that when Israel turned toward heaven, heaven turned the whole order of the world toward Israel.