2. murmured. The Hebrew verb wayilonu is distinctive of the Wilderness narrative. The various contexts in which it occurs suggest it means something like “complain” (its meaning in modern Hebrew) or “express resentment.” Some modern translations opt for “grumble,” which may be too low as diction, and there is no good reason to relinquish the time-honored “murmur.”

3. Would that we had died by the LORD’s hand in . . . Egypt. In the admirable efficiency of the dialogue, their formulation suggests that the LORD is about to kill them in the wilderness, so He might as well have done the job back in Egypt, where at least they would have died on a full stomach.

fleshpots. The Hebrew indicates something like a cauldron in which meat is cooked, but the King James Version’s rendering of “fleshpots” (“flesh” of course meaning “meat” in seventeenth-century English) has become proverbial in the language and deserves to be retained.

when we ate our fill of bread. Bread and meat here are the two staples. God will provide both—quail in the evening and manna in the morning. By this point, in the second month of the departure from Egypt, the supply of unleavened bread that the Israelites brought with them in their precipitous flight might well have been exhausted. Commentators have puzzled over the nostalgia for meat because the Israelites have taken large flocks with them. Perhaps, as a people whose principal wealth is their flocks, they are loath to make heavy inroads into their livestock for the purpose of food on the journey. In any case, there seems to be a note of panic in the claim that they are on the point of death from starvation. That note would be plausible for a population of newly freed slaves who had been accustomed to having all meals provided by their masters and who now find themselves in the arid moonscape of the Sinai desert.

4. I am about to rain down. This promise of divine benefaction may have a double edge because previous uses of this verb, mamtir, have been associated with God’s showering destruction on humanity—in the Flood story, the Sodom story, and the Plagues narrative.

so that I may test them. The most plausible construction of this phrase is the one proposed by Rashi—that Israel will have to observe the restrictions regarding leaving over manna for the next day and not attempting to gather it on the sabbath. The underlying conception of the deity in ancient Israel, beginning with the Garden story, is of a God who offers humankind a great abundance of gifts but always stipulates restrictions to be observed in their enjoyment.

6. it was the LORD Who brought you out. The people in their murmuring had directed their complaint against Moses and Aaron, saying it was the two brothers who brought them out from the land of Egypt (verse 2), while in the same breath accusing God of intending to kill them all. Now, the miraculous provision of meat at evening will make it clear to the people that all these events are directed by God.

7. in the morning you shall see the LORD’s glory. There has been some puzzlement among interpreters about the evening and morning clauses and what actually is referred to in the latter. The evening-morning sequence may be a reminiscence of the first Creation story: in both, an omnipotent God providentially conducts the progress of events, though here, in contrast to the poised harmony of the Creation story, there is palpable tension between the celestial and the terrestrial realms. Seeing the LORD’s glory may well be a threat as well as a promise because the manifestation of God’s numinous presence in the pillar of cloud (verse 10) might easily be rather terrifying to the people.

8. and what are we?—not against us are your murmurings. The Hebrew syntax, which is reproduced in this translation, has a jagged and discontinuous look, and may be intended, as Benno Jacob suggests, to mimic Moses’s sense of perturbation in responding to the people’s accusation directed at him and Aaron.

9. Draw near before the LORD. Since the preposition used here implies “presence,” the location indicated is most probably the cloud that will be mentioned in verse 10 which is invested with God’s glory.

12. I have heard the murmurings of the Israelites. This statement cuts two ways: “to hear” in biblical idiom can mean “to heed” (i.e., “to obey”), but God may at the same time be expressing annoyance with the people, for He has heard their unreasonable complaint and their accusation that all along He meant to destroy them.

13. quail. As with the plagues, generations of commentators have exerted considerable effort to explain all these events in naturalistic terms. Large flocks of migratory quail, it is contended, are sometimes found in the Sinai, and the manna is identified as a sugarlike secretion of desert aphids. One may concede that some kernels of actual memories of improvised sustenance during the Wilderness wanderings might be preserved in these stories, but the point that the narrative makes is to convert them into miraculous occurrences. No migration of quail, after all, would repeat itself every evening, and no edible granules secreted by aphids would mysteriously cease every seventh day.

14. flaky. The Hebrew meḥuspas is in dispute (in later Hebrew it means “rough”). Umberto Cassuto links it to the root ḥ-s-f “to lay bare,” and to a Ugaritic cognate and proposes that it means “revealed.”

15. Man hu, What is it? The scholarly consensus is that this is still another instance of folk etymology. The general assumption is that there was a non-Hebrew term, man, for this particular food-substance, perhaps related to an Arabic root that means “to feed.” Man, in this bit of dialogue, is an archaic form of mah, the Hebrew for “what.”

16. omer. This dry measure would have been a bit more than two quarts.

20. some men left over from it till morning, and it bred worms and stank. The refractory nature of the people—or perhaps one should say their anxiety and their greed—is manifested even in their response to this bounty from God that has come to answer their complaints. In this case, it turns out that the prohibition announced by Moses is actuated by a perfectly practical consideration: the manna will not keep overnight (except, miraculously, on the sabbath).

26. Six days you shall gather it, and on the seventh day, the sabbath. The sabbath—the word means “cessation time”—has not yet been enjoined in the Ten Commandments, but it is assumed by the story (with the Creation story behind it) to be part of the very structure of nature. Thus the double portion of manna gathered on the sixth day is preserved through the seventh, and no manna is to be found on the seventh day.

there will be none then. The literal meaning of the Hebrew is: “there will be none in it.”

28. How long do you refuse. “You” in the Hebrew is plural, so although God is addressing Moses, He is levying His accusation against the people for whom Moses serves as spokesman.

29. where he is. Literally, “under him,” that is, in his place.

31. the house of Israel. This locution (instead of “the people of Israel” or “the children of Israel [Israelites]”) is unusual. Cassuto proposes that it is meant to indicate that the Israelite posterity of the original desert-wanderers preserved this name of manna for the wilderness food.

32. for your generations. Here the translation of dorot as “ages” in several modern versions is a little misleading because the point is that the ʿomer of manna is to be kept in order to be seen by posterity. The miraculous, and surely unhistorical, character of the memorial device is patent, for the evanescent manna is the last thing one could imagine to survive through the centuries, however tightly sealed.

34. before the Covenant. This phrase is clearly an ellipsis for “before the Ark of the Covenant.” The problem is that the Ark of the Covenant, in which the two tables of the Law are kept, does not yet exist. The injunction here, then, must be read as an anticipation of the time when the Ark will be an established fact and a sacrosanct cultic focus.