Video iReport from the Desert of Zin - 1/21/2010 4:12pm

Manna in the Wilderness

When the Israelites travel from Mt. Sinai to Elim, moving from oasis to oasis, they face their next crisis:  food. The desert simply cannot sustain a nomadic population of two million people. In Exodus 16: 3 the people cry out to Moses, “If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt!  There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.”     

On the fifteenth day of the second month after they had come out of Egypt, the Lord provides food for his people:  manna. Derived from the Hebrew man hu, or “What is it,” manna covers the ground each morning to be gathered up by the Israelites. Exodus 16: 31 tells us that “it was white like coriander seed and tasted like wafers made with honey.”  And Numbers 11: 7-8 notes that it looked like resin and the people ground it in a hand mill or crushed it in a mortar, and it could be cooked in a pot or made into cakes.     

Check out Dr. Creasy’s video iReport shot in the Desert of Zin where the manna first appears to the Israelites!