1. And the people became complainers of evil. The grammatical construction of the Hebrew is unusual—literally, “And the people became [or were] as complainers of evil.” Some understand this as an indication of persistence in the activity of complaint, though it is at least as plausible to construe it as conveying the initiation of the activity. The likelihood of the latter construction is reinforced by the fact that this episode is the first of the numerous episodes of “murmuring” that punctuate Numbers. In this initial instance, no specific content of the complaint is stipulated. This lack of specification may be intended so that the episode can serve as a general paradigm for all the incidents that follow: unreasonable complaint triggering God’s consuming wrath, a plea for Moses’s intercession, an end to the devastation.

3. Taberah. The place-name is derived from the verb baʿar, “to burn,” and so means something like Conflagration.

4. the riffraff. The Hebrew ʾasafsuf is a noun in the reduplicative form (like the English “riffraff”) derived from the verb ’asaf, “to gather.” The reduplicative form in Hebrew often has a pejorative sense: it is also used for the parallel term in Exodus 12:38, ʿerev rav (perhaps originally ʿararav, “motley throng”). Richard Elliott Friedman has noted that the verb ʾasaf is especially prominent in this chapter and the next. In the long second episode of the present chapter, Moses will strategically “gather” elders around him, and in an unusual usage that appears to be dictated by the desire to repeat this verb, he does not return to or enter the camp but is “gathered back into the camp” (verse 30). The play between ʾasafsuf and ʾasaf, I would suggest, focuses the issues of leadership and national cohesiveness that are central both to this chapter and to much of what follows in Numbers. There is a negative kind of “gathering” or assembly, the ragtag collection of ʾasafsuf that congregates in order to voice divisive gripes; and there is a positive gathering of leaders in which Moses delegates authority and imposes coherent governance on the people.

and the Israelites, too. The subversive complaints of the riffraff, who are of foreign origin, prove infectious and spread to the body of the Israelites proper.

Who will feed us meat? This question may seem puzzling because the people immediately go on to mention not meat but fish—a prominent source of protein in the Egyptian diet—and its elaborate vegetable garnishings. In the event, they get not fish, scarcely imaginable in this desert setting, but fowl. Some interpreters contend, with a bit of a stretch, that “meat” means “fish.” It may make more sense to infer that the complainers, filled with craving or lust (taʾawah) for the good old days of slavery, remember the sumptuous feasts of Egypt and, in their appetitive recollection, are a little confused about the culinary terms: first they say “meat,” the most substantial object of gluttonous craving, but when they review the actual menu of their Egyptian meals, the main course, plausibly enough along the banks of the Nile, turns out to be fish.

5. for free. This term is a striking instance of selective memory. The slaves did not have to pay for their food, which was provided by their owners, but of course a brutally high price was exacted through the punishing labor imposed upon them by their taskmasters.

6. before our eyes. The Hebrew lacks “before” (a mere particle, l^e), whether because this is an ellipsis or a scribal omission. In the Hebrew, there is an anomalous “to” (ʾel) before “manna,” and perhaps this preposition actually belongs before “eyes.”

7. bdellium. This English term may derive from the Hebrew bedolaḥ or its Semitic cognates; it is a semitransparent yellowish gum. Later Hebrew, working from what is probably a misinterpretation of the biblical term, uses bedolaḥ in the sense of “crystal.”

8. grind it . . . pound it . . . cook it . . . make it into cakes. This itemization of processes of food preparation (the “it” is merely implied in the Hebrew) makes one suspect that the reports of the manna reflect a real memory of some improvised food in the Wilderness wanderings. A common conjecture is that it might be the edible secretions of a particular insect found on trees in the Sinai. However ingeniously processed, it would have offered poor competition to the refinement and variety of Egyptian cuisine that riffraff and Israelites alike recall.

the creaminess of oil. In all likelihood, this refers to the thick upper layer of the first press of olive oil.

10. weeping by its clans. Throughout this episode, “weep” has the obvious sense of “complain,” but it is used instead of several possible biblical alternatives because it stresses the whining nature of the complaints.

11. Why have You done evil to Your servant. “Evil” here means “harm” but pointedly carries forward the perception by Moses in the previous verse that this whole affair is evil, bad business.

burden. The notion of the responsibility of leadership as a heavy load repeats the emphasis of the parallel episode in Exodus 18.

12. Did I conceive all this people, did I give birth to them. In an extravagant metaphor that expresses Moses’s sense of outrageous anomaly in the task he is required to do, he asks whether he is the mother of all these teeming multitudes. He then goes on, in the words he attributes to God, to wonder whether he is supposed to be an ʾomen, a guardian or private tutor of the sort that wealthy families would hire to care for and instruct their children.

15. kill me, pray, altogether, if I have found favor in Your eyes. In Exodus 33, the sign Moses sought that he had found favor in God’s eyes was that God would elect to go in the midst of the people and would show Moses something of the divine nature. Now, Moses in his desperation imagines an end to his suffering through death as the sign of God’s favor.

17. hold back some of the spirit. The verb ʾatsal, which Esau uses when he asks Isaac whether he has held in reserve some blessing for his real firstborn, suggests that a certain limited portion of the spirit vouchsafed Moses is taken from him to be distributed among the elders. This is precisely what is involved in the delegation of authority.

21. Six hundred thousand foot soldiers. That is, 600,000 males the age of military conscription. This figure would then be multiplied through all the additional female and minor mouths to feed. The incredulity expressed in the question indicates that even Moses cannot believe there is a way to provide meat—both he and God take the people at their own initial word, forgetting about the fish—for this vast populace.

22. provide for them. The Hebrew verb here usually means “find,” but this understanding of its meaning in context goes back to the Targum Onkelos and is endorsed by most modern scholars.

23. Will the LORD’s hand be too short? “Hand” here has the idiomatic sense of “power” but also manifests a metaphorical image—the hand of God reaching all the way to the sea to sweep up the quail and rain them down on the Israelite camp.

25. as the spirit rested upon them, that they prophesied. To “prophesy” (hitnabeiʾ) is to exhibit ecstatic behavior—dancing, writhing, emitting vatic speech. In this instance, the elders, who have been designated to share the burden of leadership with Moses, don’t do anything other than to make manifest through prophesying, after they have gathered round Moses, that they, too, are invested with the divine spirit and so share his responsibility. The end of the verse makes clear that this is a one-time event: the elders demonstrate here that they partake of the spirit, but they have no continuing role as prophets, in contrast to Moses.

26. they were among those inscribed. The most likely meaning is that they were “inscribed” among the seventy elders but differed from them in not coming out of the Tent. The particle waw, which usually means “and,” can have an adversative sense, as it probably does here, when it prefixes a verb in the perfective tense instead of the usual imperfective tense for historical narration (weloʾ yatsʾu, “but they did not go out”). Abraham ibn Ezra helpfully glosses: “they did not go out from the camp of Israel to the Tent of Meeting” (where the other elders had gathered).

28. from his youth. The Hebrew mibeḥuraw could also mean “from his chosen ones.”

My lord Moses, restrain them. The prophesying of the other sixty-eight elders in the designated place of sanctity, before the Tent of Meeting, is one thing, but the manifestation of prophecy in the midst of the Israelite camp is quite another, for it could turn into a dangerously contagious threat to Moses’s leadership.

29. Would that all the LORD’s people were prophets. Moses, just having surrendered a portion of the spirit invested in him to the seventy elders, now hyperbolically expresses the sense that holding on to a monopoly of power (equated with access to the divine spirit) is not at all what impels him as leader. Although he knows that there is scarcely any prospect that the entire people will become prophets, he nevertheless points to an ideal of what we might call radical spiritual egalitarianism. Access to the realm of the spirit is granted by God, in principle to anyone God chooses. The “gathering” of the elders to share the spirit is the antithesis of the mob of riffraff that assembles to express in complaint the dictates of the belly, not the spirit.

31. swept up quail from the sea. There may be a realistic kernel to this miraculous event: flocks of migratory quail from the sea do cross over the Sinai, where, exhausted from their flight, they are easy to trap.

32. ten homers. This would be a huge amount, since the ḥomer is ten ephahs, or more than five bushels.

they laid them out. The evident purpose is to cure the meat in the hot desert sun. But two ancient versions read instead of wayishteḥu, “and they laid out,” wayishḥetu, “and they slaughtered” (a reversal of the second and the third consonants of the verb).

33. it had not yet been chewed. The verb for “chew” or “consume,” yikaret, is unusual, for its ordinary meaning is “to be cut off.” It probably occurs here as an ominous bit of micro-foreshadowing, since the “blow” (or “plague”) God strikes against the people will, in biblical idiom, cut off many of them.

34. Kibroth-Hattaavah. The Hebrew means Graves of Desire (or Lust). In both this episode and the preceding one of Taberah, as in many incidents to follow, the Israelites move across the trackless wastes of the Sinai peninsula ironically leaving a trail of new place-names that is the history of their own repeated derilections.