Beshalach 5786
A Jar of Manna
This week we are reading Parashat Beshalach (Exod 13:17–17:16) and I’m returning to a subject I wrote about in this column two years ago: manna. (Maybe next year I’ll be able to get off the dime.) Let’s have a look at the conclusion of the story:
Exod 16:31 The house of Israel named it manna; it was like coriander seed, white, and it tasted like wafers in honey. 32 Moses said, “This is what the LORD has commanded: Let one omer of it be kept throughout the ages, in order that they may see the bread that I fed you in the wilderness when I brought you out from the land of Egypt.” 33 And Moses said to Aaron, “Take a jar, put one omer of manna in it, and place it before the LORD, to be kept throughout the ages.” 34 As the LORD had commanded Moses, Aaron placed it before the Pact, to be kept. 35 And the Israelites ate manna forty years, until they came to a settled land; they ate the manna until they came to the border of the land of Canaan. 36The omer is a tenth of an ephah. [NJPS]
The “Pact” of v. 34 (or “Testimony,” as an NJPS footnote suggests) is explained by Nahum Sarna, in the JPS Torah Commentary, this way:
Ellipsis for “the Ark of the Pact.” Hebrew ʿedut is synonymous with berit, “covenant.” The Ark housed the two tablets of stone on which the Decalogue was inscribed. These are variously designated “the tablets of the Pact” (Heb. luḥot ha-ʿedut), as in 31:18 and elsewhere, and “the Tablets of the Covenant” (Heb. luḥot ha-berit), as in Deuteronomy 9:9, 11. Following the revolt of Korah, Aaron’s rod was similarly deposited “before the Lord,” that is, “before the Pact,” for safekeeping and for an educational purpose, as recounted in Numbers 17:19, 22, 25.
Problem! The covenant will not be made until Exodus 24, and the “Ark” in which the Pact was kept will not even be a twinkle in God’s eye until Exod 25:22, and will not be made (let alone installed) until Exodus 37. Sarna notes, about the command to place an omer of manna there:
Since the priesthood in Israel has not yet been established, this instruction cannot be contemporaneous with the events previously described.
Sarna was a very traditional man, but he had nothing to fear in saying this; he was standing on the shoulders of a giant, Rashi. The great 11th-c. scholar said this (in my Commentators’ Bible translation):
This verse was not said until the Tent of Meeting was built, even though it is recorded here in the section about the manna.
To place something “before YHWH” — the Omnipresent, as later Jewish tradition would describe him — you have to have a place on earth that represents him. That spot, during the Israelites’ wilderness sojourn, was the Tent of Meeting (or the Tabernacle, if you prefer) or at the very least the Ark.
The instructions for making the Tabernacle and its fittings, as well as the description of the actual construction, are most certainly written in the priestly voice, and scholars agree that this particular paragraph of the manna story was too. So this conflict (not “solved,” as others can be, by a disagreement between earlier sources) is today’s puzzler. Richard Elliott Friedman writes in his Torah commentary:
This problem has nothing to do with questions of authorship in critical biblical scholarship. Nor is it to be explained by the traditional rabbinic principle of “There is no early or late in the Torah.” Rather, there is a series of items that are reported to have been placed by the Testimony in the Tabernacle: the manna, the incense, Aaron’s staff. The placement of each is reported in the context of the story or law that relates to it. Since the story of the manna is told here, the report that Aaron placed it at the Testimony is included here as well. To have saved this report for a later, more chronologically appropriate, point in the Torah would have meant cutting it off from the rest of the manna story. The report in the next verse that they ate the manna for forty years likewise goes chronologically past the present moment in the story. It thus further confirms that the purpose of the present context is to cover the entire matter of the manna in one place.
In his The Bible with Sources Revealed, Friedman identifies v. 35, the verse about eating manna for forty years, as an intrusion from the J source. Why might the instruction to put the manna “before YHWH” not be an intrusion from some other source as well?
We might also pose this question to him: Why is it not “to be explained by the traditional rabbinic principle of ‘There is no early or late in the Torah’”? That famous express goes back (Hebrew Wikipedia informs me) to the Mekhilta, the Tannaitic (Mishnah-era) midrash on Exodus. I think of it in terms of the disagreement between Nahmanides (who thinks everything in the Torah happened in chronological order unless a recorded date tells us otherwise) and Rashi (who, as you see, happily accepts the ancient rabbinic expression).
If we read on to v. 36, the P voice (per standard scholarship) returns, to explain helpfully to us that an omer is one-tenth of an ephah. This is not a religiously meaningful comment — though Abarbanel sees “one-tenth” as an allusion to tithing. If the Torah were a contemporary book, v. 36 would be a footnote, not part of the main text. That might be equally true of vv. 34–35, the former explaining that an omer of manna was latter saved to document the experience, the latter explaining how long the Israelites continued to eat manna.
More to the point, perhaps, would be to pay attention to the tense of the verb in v. 34. If you say the Israelites ate manna only until they reached Canaan, you are writing after the manna has ceased to fall, after the Israelites have offered the Passover sacrifice at Gilgal — after they have crossed the Jordan into Canaan. See Joshua 5 for the details. Exod 16:34 is a much a “smoking gun” as “the Canaanites were then in the land” (Gen 12:6), which had Ibn Ezra so worried.
Once more: If Exod 16:35 can look back on forty years of eating manna and explain when that was over, then it is very straightforward that the Torah is written in a voice from the long after the events that it concerns. Let’s look at that for a moment from another angle. In Exod 16:18, the Israelites are using an omer-measure to see how much they have gathered. If you keep an omer-measure in your camping supplies, you know perfectly well how much an omer of anything is. Aaron did not have to ask Moses what an omer was. Readers at the time the Torah was written, however, did have to ask. (It’s a tenth of an ephah.)
We (or at least I) often read the Torah as if it were a novel. We are finding out about the events “as they happen,” the same way we do reading a modern book. Once Moses tells Aaron, “Take a jar, put one omer of manna in it, and place it before the LORD, to be kept throughout the ages,” the spell is broken. Instead of getting live updates from the wilderness journey, we realize we are being told a story of long ago. Splitting the Torah text into the apparent earlier sources from which it was created tells us a lot, but it doesn’t tell us everything we want to know about how the Torah came into being — or about what it would really be like to live on manna.
