Sixty Cubits of Manna and the Groan of Rabbi Tarfon

They were sitting in the shade, the elders in their row and Rabbi Tarfon among them, when the old man seated before them lifted his head and said it plainly, the way a merchant states a price.

The manna that fell in the wilderness stood sixty cubits high.

Sixty cubits. The height of a tower. A wall of bread taller than the Temple gates, descending out of the morning sky onto a camp of former slaves, drifting down white as coriander seed, sweet as wafers in honey (Exodus 16:31), and stacking itself, by this man's accounting, into a column nine stories tall.

The man who said it was Rabbi Elazar Hamodai, Elazar of Modiim, and he did not smile when he said it. He folded his hands and waited.

A Groan Among the Elders

Rabbi Tarfon let out a groan that everyone heard.

"Modai," he said, "how long will you go on heaping your wonders upon us?"

It was the protest of a tired colleague, not an enemy. Tarfon knew this man. Elazar Hamodai had a habit, and the habit was this, that wherever Scripture left a miracle standing at a modest height, Elazar would find the verse that made it tower. The other elders had learned to brace themselves when he opened his mouth. A miracle in Elazar's hands never shrank. It grew until the mind ached trying to hold it.

But Elazar did not retreat. He leaned forward.

"It is a verse in the Torah," he said.

The Two Measures

He began where he always began, with a question he considered beyond dispute.

Which of God's measures is greater, the measure He pours out in punishment, or the measure He pours out in reward?

The elders knew the answer. Everyone knew the answer. The middah, the measure, of good outweighs the measure of wrath. God is stingy with judgment and lavish with blessing. He punishes by the cup and rewards by the river. No one in the row of elders raised a hand to argue, because no one could.

"The measure of good," Elazar said. "Now watch what Scripture does with the measure of punishment."

The Windows of the Flood

He took them back to the generation of the flood, when the world drowned.

The waters of that judgment did not seep up from the ground alone. Scripture says the windows of the heavens were opened (Genesis 7:11), and through those opened windows the rain came down for forty days, and the waters climbed the mountains and kept climbing, until they stood fifteen cubits above the highest peaks (Genesis 7:20).

Fifteen cubits of water over the mountains of the earth. That was what came through windows. Small apertures. The narrow openings of heaven, unlatched just enough to end a world.

"That," said Elazar, "is the measure of punishment. Windows, and fifteen cubits."

Then he turned to the manna.

Doors, Not Windows

For the bread of the wilderness, Scripture uses a different word, and Elazar Hamodai had built his whole tower of bread on that one word.

"He commanded the skies above, and He opened the doors of heaven, and He rained upon them manna for food, and gave them the grain of heaven" (Psalms 78:23-24).

Doors. Not windows. When God punished, He cracked open the windows of the sky. When God fed His children in a wasteland, He flung the doors wide.

And now came the arithmetic, delivered in the dry voice of a man measuring lumber. A door contains four windows within its frame. The verse says doors, plural, so count two doors. Two doors hold eight windows. If two windows of heaven poured out fifteen cubits of floodwater, then eight windows pour out four times as much. Four times fifteen is sixty.

Sixty cubits of manna. At the least. For the measure of good is always the greater measure, and the count of the windows was only where the generosity began.

The elders sat with it. Tarfon had groaned at a wonder, and Elazar had answered him with a sum, window by window, door by door, until the bread stood sixty cubits over the camp of Israel and there was no verse left to pull it down with.

A Table Set Before the Nations

Another teacher, Issi ben Yehudah, added the detail that finishes the picture, and after Elazar's tower of bread it almost had to be true.

A thing that tall cannot be hidden. When the manna came down for Israel, the nations of the earth saw it fall.

The Egyptians who had owned them, the peoples whose lands they skirted, all of them could look toward the wilderness and watch bread rain out of heaven onto a camp of wanderers who had been slaves, who owned no fields, no granaries, no country. Every morning the table was laid in the open, in plain sight of every people that had despised them, as the psalm sings, "You spread a table before me in full view of my foes" (Psalms 23:5).

That was the manna of Elazar Hamodai. Not a thin frost on the ground for Israel to scrape up quietly before the sun grew hot, but a public act of heaven, sixty cubits of white bread standing in the desert light, visible from every border, so that the whole world would know whose children were eating in the wilderness, and how wide the doors had been opened to feed them.

Tarfon had asked how long Elazar would confound them with his wonders. The answer, it turned out, was as long as the verses held. And the verses held.