The Israelites called it manna. It fell from heaven every morning, and the Torah describes it with a comparison that immediately puzzles the Mekhilta's rabbis: "And it was like coriander seed, white" (Exodus 16:31). The Hebrew word used is "gad," and Rabbi Yehoshua takes it at face value — the manna resembled coriander seed in shape and size.
But this creates a problem. Coriander seed is not white. It is reddish-brown. If the Torah says the manna looked like coriander seed, a reader might naturally picture something dark and earthy. The verse anticipates this confusion and adds a single decisive word: "white."
The Mekhilta treats this as a textual correction built directly into Scripture. The Torah gives you one image — coriander seed — to establish the manna's size and texture. Then it immediately overrides the color you would have imagined. The manna shared coriander's form but not its hue. It was bright, luminous, unmistakably distinct from any ordinary grain.
This small detail reveals how the rabbis read biblical descriptions with extraordinary precision. Every word earns its place. If the Torah had meant to describe something that simply looked like coriander, it could have stopped there. The addition of "white" signals that the manna was something genuinely unprecedented — familiar enough in shape to be compared to a known seed, yet strange enough in appearance to require immediate qualification. The bread from heaven borrowed from the natural world only what it needed, then departed into the miraculous.