Moses struck a rock and a river came pouring out. Not a trickle, not a seep—a full river, bursting from dry stone in the middle of the desert, clear and sweet enough to make an entire nation gasp. According to Josephus in his Antiquities of the Jews, the Israelites had been on the verge of stoning their own leader when God told Moses to take his rod and simply hit the rock. The people stood there watching, stones still in their hands, and then water exploded from the cliff face.
But that miracle came at the end of a long chain of desperation. The journey from Egypt to Mount Sinai took three brutal months. The desert offered nothing—no food, no shade, and almost no water. What little the Israelites found was bitter. At a place called Marah (Exodus 15:23), which literally means "bitterness" in Hebrew, they discovered a well that even the cattle refused to drink from.
Moses prayed. God answered by telling him to split a stick lengthwise and lower it into the well. Then Moses ordered the strongest men to draw water until most of the well was emptied out—and only the water left at the bottom was drinkable. It was not an instant fix. It was grueling physical labor combined with divine instruction.
Then came the quail. Josephus describes enormous flocks of birds flying in from the Arabian Gulf, so exhausted from their journey over the sea that they dropped right into the Israelites' camp. And after the quail came the manna—a dew that fell from heaven, sweet as honey, shaped like coriander seeds, appearing fresh every morning. Each person could gather exactly one omer per day, no matter how hard they tried to hoard more. The surplus simply rotted.
Josephus adds a striking detail: he claims that manna still fell in that region of the desert in his own day, nearly fifteen centuries after Moses. The Hebrews called it man, which Josephus says comes from the Hebrew question "What is this?"—because that was exactly what they asked when they first saw it on the ground (Exodus 16:15).
At Rephidim, the Amalekites attacked. Moses placed Joshua in command and climbed a hill to pray with his arms raised. Every time his arms dropped, Israel started losing. So Aaron and Hur—Miriam's husband—stood on either side of Moses and physically held his hands up until sunset. Israel won, captured the Amalekite camp, and seized enough gold, silver, and weapons to transform a band of refugees into an army. Moses built an altar and named it "The Lord the Conqueror," prophesying that the Amalekites would one day be utterly destroyed.