Quails and manna (Exod 16:13-15)
Exod 16:13-15
As we continue the story of the manna, we learn more about the nature of God’s provision. God graciously gives to all who cry to Him for help, but He especially looks after those who find themselves in need as a result of following His leading. This was the case of the Israelites who ended up in the wilderness precisely because they obeyed the call to come out of slavery. Further, God gives open-handedly and generously: the quails cover the ground of the entire camp (Exod 16:13).[1] These little migratory birds travel across Africa to Europe flying very low. By the time they reach northern Africa, they are usually so exhausted that many fall and just lie on the ground and can be caught by hand. God uses this natural phenomenon He created to feed His people but does so entirely according to His timing.
The focus of our reading is primarily on the manna, however, since this is going to be Israel’s staple diet. Bedouin tribes today know of a substance that they call manna, which is the excrement droppings of tiny insects that suck the juice from the fruit of the tamarisk tree. These small yellowish-white flakes are rich in carbohydrates and sugar, solidify in the cold, disintegrate in the heat, generally do not keep for long and can be baked into a kind of bread. However, manna as it is experienced today in the desert is a seasonal occurrence and comes in limited quantities, whereas Israel was looked after day in day out all through their wilderness wanderings for 40 years. As we shall see, the manna given to the Israelites also kept for an additional day on Fridays when a double amount was collected to last for the Sabbath as well (Exod 16:23-24). God then provides here by using, it seems, what He created in the natural world, but His timing and some other unusual features highlight that such provision is not mere coincidence, but God’s active involvement in looking after His people.
Although the manna may have been known to desert people, it is clear that this type of food was new, even perplexing to Israel (Exod 16:15). Here we learn yet another aspect of God’s provision: its surprising nature. The Israelites did not recognise the manna as food and this is a recurring emphasis when Scripture reflects on the manna’s significance later (Deut 8:3). In other words, God’s provision may not look like provision when we receive it and yet it often proves more nourishing than what we thought we were looking for.
I was reminded of this when I recently read the true story of an American woman, an academic and a self-confessed feminist, who was fiercely independent with a passion for teaching and changing people’s perceptions on gender. However, on a work assignment in Japan, she falls in love with and eventually marries a Japanese man who speaks only halting English. She initially hopes that her husband might relocate to the US, but circumstances force her to settle in Japan instead: a culture where women are mostly housewives and if they work in an office, it is usually in secretarial positions. In her book, The Good Shufu, she struggles to make sense of her experience. How could someone like her with her doctorate and flair for intellectual conversations find happiness with a man with whom she has to communicate in basic English? How could she settle in a culture so diagonally opposed to her views on gender? Yet, despite all the odds, she finds a deeply satisfying relationship of love and trust. As her story illustrates, we do not always know what we need, and God so often surprises us in his provision. Once again, God calls us to trust His wisdom.
[1] True, Israel will experience need in the wilderness, but this is meant as a short-term training ground so that when they have plenty later, they might acknowledge the Lord as the source of their wealth (Deut 8:16-17). But for their disobedience, the wilderness would have been a brief interlude counted in a few months rather than years, followed by the entry into the abundance of the Promised Land.
