16:31 The house of Israel 1 called its name “manna.” 2 It was like coriander seed and was white, and it tasted 3 like wafers with honey.
16:32 Moses said, “This is what 4 the Lord has commanded: ‘Fill an omer with it to be kept 5 for generations to come, 6 so that they may see 7 the food I fed you in the desert when I brought you out from the land of Egypt.’” 16:33 Moses said to Aaron, “Take a jar and put in it an omer full of manna, and place it before the Lord to be kept for generations to come.” 16:34 Just as the Lord commanded Moses, so Aaron placed it before the Testimony 8 for safekeeping. 9
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. 16:36 (Now an omer is one tenth of an ephah.) 10
1 sn The name “house of Israel” is unusual in this context.
2 tn Hebrew מָן (man).
3 tn Heb “like seed of coriander, white, its taste was.”
4 tn Heb “This is the thing that.”
5 tn Heb “for keeping.”
6 tn Heb “according to your generations” (see Exod 12:14).
7 tn In this construction after the particle expressing purpose or result, the imperfect tense has the nuance of final imperfect, equal to a subjunctive in the classical languages.
7 sn The “Testimony” is a reference to the Ark of the Covenant; so the pot of manna would be placed before Yahweh in the tabernacle. W. C. Kaiser says that this later instruction came from a time after the tabernacle had been built (see Exod 25:10-22; W. C. Kaiser, Jr., “Exodus,” EBC 2:405). This is not a problem since the final part of this chapter had to have been included at the end of the forty years in the desert.
8 tn “for keeping.”
10 tn The words “omer” and “ephah” are transliterated Hebrew words. The omer is mentioned only in this passage. (It is different from a “homer” [cf. Ezek 45:11-14].) An ephah was a dry measure whose capacity is uncertain: “Quotations given for the ephah vary from ca. 45 to 20 liters” (C. Houtman, Exodus, 2:340-41).