When the manna first appeared in the wilderness, the Israelites had never seen anything like it. (Exodus 16:15) records their reaction: "And the children of Israel saw it, and each said to his neighbor, 'man hu.'" The Mekhilta unpacks this mysterious phrase, which became the very name of the miraculous food that sustained an entire nation for forty years.
The simplest reading is that "man hu" means "What is it?" in the colloquial speech of the time. The Israelites woke up, saw the ground covered with a fine, flaky substance, and turned to each other in bewilderment. They had no frame of reference. This was not bread. It was not fruit. It was not any food they recognized from Egypt or anywhere else. So they asked the most natural question: What is this?
But the expounders of metaphors offered a different interpretation. They said Israel called it "man" because the word means "sustenance" or "portion." Rather than a confused question, the name was a deliberate identification. The people recognized immediately that this strange substance was their divinely appointed food, their allotted portion from heaven. They named it not out of ignorance but out of understanding.
The two readings sit side by side in the Mekhilta without contradiction. One captures the human moment of encountering the genuinely unknown. The other captures the spiritual recognition that what looks unfamiliar may already be exactly what you need. Both interpretations shaped how later generations understood the manna: as something so unprecedented it defied naming, and yet so perfectly suited to its purpose that its name said everything.