16:35 Now the Israelites ate manna forty years, until they came to a land that was inhabited; they ate manna until they came to the border of the land of Canaan.
16:16 “This is what 4 the Lord has commanded: 5 ‘Each person is to gather 6 from it what he can eat, an omer 7 per person 8 according to the number 9 of your people; 10 each one will pick it up 11 for whoever lives 12 in his tent.’”
1 tn The preterite with the vav (ו) consecutive is subordinated here as a temporal clause.
2 tn Heb “morning by morning.” This is an example of the repetition of words to express the distributive sense; here the meaning is “every morning” (see GKC 388 §121.c).
3 tn The perfect tenses here with vav (ו) consecutives have the frequentative sense; they function in a protasis-apodosis relationship (GKC 494 §159.g).
3 tn Heb “the thing that.”
4 tn The perfect tense could be taken as a definite past with Moses now reporting it. In this case a very recent past. But in declaring the word from Yahweh it could be instantaneous, and receive a present tense translation – “here and now he commands you.”
5 tn The form is the plural imperative: “Gather [you] each man according to his eating.”
6 sn The omer is an amount mentioned only in this chapter, and its size is unknown, except by comparison with the ephah (v. 36). A number of recent English versions approximate the omer as “two quarts” (cf. NCV, CEV, NLT); TEV “two litres.”
7 tn Heb “for a head.”
8 tn The word “number” is an accusative that defines more precisely how much was to be gathered (see GKC 374 §118.h).
9 tn Traditionally “souls.”
10 tn Heb “will take.”
11 tn “lives” has been supplied.
4 sn Later Judaism ruled that “too small” meant fewer than ten (S. R. Driver, Exodus, 88).
5 tn The clause uses the comparative min (מִן) construction: יִמְעַט הַבַּיִת מִהְיֹת מִשֶּׂה (yim’at habbayit mihyot miseh, “the house is small from being from a lamb,” or “too small for a lamb”). It clearly means that if there were not enough people in the household to have a lamb by themselves, they should join with another family. For the use of the comparative, see GKC 430 §133.c.
6 tn Heb “he and his neighbor”; the referent (the man) has been specified in the translation for clarity.
7 tn Heb “who is near to his house.”
8 tn The construction uses a perfect tense with a vav (ו) consecutive after a conditional clause: “if the household is too small…then he and his neighbor will take.”
9 tn Heb “[every] man according to his eating.”