"What Is It?" Interpreting Exodus 16:15
Traces the history of interpretation of the Israelites' puzzled exclamation man hu upon first seeing manna, surveying grammarians and commentators who read it as a question in a foreign or archaic dialect, as a declaration that the food was 'prepared' or 'a gift,' or as a spontaneous naming after a familiar desert substance, and shows how each reading resolves the awkward Hebrew of the phrase differently.
Ron surveys centuries of commentary on the Israelites’ puzzled cry man hu on first seeing manna in the wilderness, since standard Hebrew would call for mah rather than man. He lays out the three main explanatory traditions — that the Israelites were using a foreign or archaic word for “what,” that man means “prepared food” or “a gift,” or that they were simply (mis)naming the substance after a familiar natural analogue — tracing each back through medieval grammarians and rabbinic sources to the present day.
Zvi Ron received semikhah from the Israeli Rabbanut and his Ph.D. in Jewish Theology from Spertus University. He is an educator living in Neveh Daniel, Israel, and the author of Sefer Katan ve-Gadol (Rossi Publications: 2006) about the large and small letters in Tanakh. He is Deputy Editor of The Jewish Bible Quarterly.
Cite this article
Zvi Ron. ""What Is It?" Interpreting Exodus 16:15." Jewish Bible Quarterly 38, no. 4 (October – December 2010): 231–236.
Zvi Ron. ""What Is It?" Interpreting Exodus 16:15." Jewish Bible Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 4, 2010, pp. 231–236.