Exodus 16:31-36

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 

[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]  ⁴ tn Heb “This is the thing that.”

[16:32]  ⁵ tn Heb “for keeping.”

[16:32]  ⁶ tn Heb “according to your generations” (see Exod 12:14).

[16:32]  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.

[16:34]  ⁸ 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]  ⁹ tn “for keeping.”

[16:36]  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).