Exodus 16:26-36

16:26 Six days you will gather it, but on the seventh day, the Sabbath, there will not be any.”

16:27 On the seventh day some of the people went out to gather it, but they found nothing. 16:28 So the Lord said to Moses, “How long do you refuse ¹  to obey my commandments and my instructions? 16:29 See, because the Lord has given you the Sabbath, that is why ²  he is giving you food for two days on the sixth day. Each of you stay where you are; ³  let no one ⁴  go out of his place on the seventh day.” 16:30 So the people rested on the seventh day.

16:31 The house of Israel ⁵  called its name “manna.” ⁶  It was like coriander seed and was white, and it tasted ⁷  like wafers with honey.

16:32 Moses said, “This is what ⁸  the Lord has commanded: ‘Fill an omer with it to be kept ⁹  for generations to come, ¹⁰  so that they may see ¹¹  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 ¹²  for safekeeping. ¹³ 

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.) ¹⁴ 

[16:28]  ¹ tn The verb is plural, and so it is addressed to the nation and not to Moses. The perfect tense in this sentence is the characteristic perfect, denoting action characteristic, or typical, of the past and the present.

[16:29]  ¹ sn Noting the rabbinic teaching that the giving of the Sabbath was a sign of God’s love – it was accomplished through the double portion on the sixth day – B. Jacob says, “God made no request unless He provided the means for its execution” (Exodus, 461).

[16:29]  ² tn Heb “remain, a man where he is.”

[16:29]  ³ tn Or “Let not anyone go” (see GKC 445 §138.d).

[16:31]  ¹ sn The name “house of Israel” is unusual in this context.

[16:31]  ² tn Hebrew מָן (man).

[16:31]  ³ tn Heb “like seed of coriander, white, its taste was.”

[16:32]  ¹ tn Heb “This is the thing that.”

[16:32]  ² tn Heb “for keeping.”

[16:32]  ³ tn Heb “according to your generations” (see Exod 12:14).

[16:32]  ⁴ 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.

[16:34]  ¹ 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.

[16:34]  ² tn “for keeping.”

[16:36]  ¹ 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).