Second Rebellion: Complaint about Food (11:4–35)

Meat (11:4). Meat was available in Israel’s livestock and herds, but those were reserved for festive occasions and their supply of milk products. Goshen in the eastern Nile Delta was the breadbasket of Egypt, lush with vegetation and abounding with natural and man-made canals, whose waters teemed with fish and were replete with nutrients for abundant crop production. The foods listed are among the most commonly grown in the region: “cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic.”92 Several of these are represented in Egyptian tomb murals. All require ample amounts of water for irrigation.

Wall painting from the tomb of Userhet shows the gift of loaves, figs, a pomegranate, a cucumber (?), grapes, and a honeycomb.

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Manna (11:7). The description of manna demonstrates that the Israelites’ claims are spurious. This botanical and culinary description of the manna refutes each point of the people’s complaint. See sidebar on “Manna.”

Manna

Precise identification of “manna” with known agricultural products of ancient or modern times is somewhat tentative. The association with coriander seed is likely an indicator of its taste, since that seed is used for flavoring (similar to sesame or poppy seeds),A-9 in which case “manna” may refer to a variety of small seeds produced by desert plants.

Physical description seems intended in the comparison to bdellium, a loan word in English from the Semitic root budulchu (Akk.) via the Greek bdellion, generally associated with a pale yellow or white aromatic resin.A-10 Generally manna has been associated with a by-product of the tamarisk tree found in northern Arabia. B. Childs notes:

There forms from the sap of the tamarisk tree a species of yellowish-white flake or ball, which results from the activity of a type of plant lice (Trabutina mannipara and Najococcus serpentinus) or aphids. The insect punctures the fruit of the tree and excretes a substance from this juice. During the warmth of the day it (the substance) melts, but it congeals when cold. It has a sweet taste. These pellets or cakes are gathered by the natives in the early morning and, when cooked, provide a sort of bread. The food decays quickly and attracts ants. The annual crop in the Sinai Peninsula is exceedingly small and some years fails completely.A-11

The hardened resinous manna could be ground on millstones or in a mortar, typically made from basalt or hard limestone, and then boiled and formed into cakes. The taste is compared to the rich creamy olive oil that comes from the upper layer of the first pressing of the olives. In Exodus 16:31, the taste of manna cakes is compared to honey. The manna appeared in the early morning, blown in from the heavens during the night so that enough could be gathered for the daily consumption after the morning dew had evaporated.

Prophesied (11:25). Ecstatic prophets are known from the texts at Mari and Babylon, where they were called maḫḫu (or muḫḫum; female muḫḫutum) and functioned as one category of divination personnel. The maḫḫu would go into a frenzied trance and speak utterances believed to be derived from gods or goddesses like Ishtar, Nergal, or Adad.93 These “prophets” (or better “diviners”) were sometimes considered madmen because of their abnormal behavior.

Quail (11:31). An east wind and a south wind descend on the camp with provision of meat. Writers through history have described the movement of quail (genus coturnix coturnix or coturnix vulgaris) across the Sinai, generally northward in the spring (as here) and southward in the fall. Fowling using low-slung nets is known from several Egyptian tomb murals, including those of Kagemni at Saqqarah dating to the Sixth Dynasty.94 Israelite fowling with nets is mentioned in Hosea 7:12.

The fourteenth-century A.D. Arab writer Al-Qazwini described the fowling activity of the people El-ʿArish in the north coastal Sinai. This area is known to have between one and two million quail in the autumn migration of these small birds.95 The extraordinary quantity of quail here is swept in “from the sea” (probably from the Gulf of Aqaba if the wind is from the east), and then downward toward the encampment of Israel.

The magnitude of the quail is measured in three ways. (1) Breadth: a day’s journey in each direction (about twelve to fifteen miles, hence an area of more than four hundred square miles). (2) Height: three feet (two cubits) above the ground, referring either to the height of the birds’ flight or the depth of the piles of quail. (3) Quantity: each person gathering at least ten homers over a two-day period, a volume estimated at between thirty-eight and sixty-five bushels.96 Some of the birds are eaten right away, while most of them are spread out around the camp, presumably for drying the meat in the hot sun after cleaning and salting them.97

Fowling using low-slung nets

Z. Radovan/www.BibleLandPictures.com

Plague (11:33). In their greed the people probably consume unprocessed meat and are struck down with food poisoning, since the name of the site, Kibroth Hattaavah (“Graves of Craving”), evidences a form of talionic justice for those who protest against Yahweh.

Kibroth Hattaavah . . . to Hazeroth (11:35). The location of these sites is conjecture and dependent on the location of Mount Sinai. If Mount Sinai is Jebel Musa, then Hazeroth may be associated with the Wadi Hudeirat region, forty miles northeast of Jebel Musa. If Mount Sinai is located at Jebel Sin Bisher, then Kibroth Hattaavah and Hazeroth may be situated along the route eastward across the central Sinai region toward Elath and Mount Seir.