Week 3 Exodus
Exodus sixteen is the Manna chapter.
The Hebrew tribes had been on the road for several weeks, travelling south and east, in the wilderness, getting hungry, getting angry. To help them out the Lord used his power to make a flaky grain-like substance that covered the ground during the night. Like a kind of light snow. The people had to collect it each morning – specifically: take an omer for each person you have in your tent. My bible footnote says that an omer was about two litres, so two dry litres of this coriander-sized seed per person per day.
A couple of chapters back I read that coming out of Egypt: there were about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children. I worked with 600k as my baseline.
Feeding 600k people 2 litres of manna took 1.2 million litres of manna a day.
Feeding them for one year was 434 million litres.
And since the Hebrews ended up in the desert for forty years the Lord ended up providing 17,360,000,000 litres of manna all together.
The one downside of a miracle like this is its regularity. When you can set your calendar on a miracle it starts to seem like a normal thing, which means a miracle can be tricky at times.
I remind myself that normal events are normal. But normal miracles are still miracles.
Note: quotes from Exodus 16:16, 12:37 (NLT). The numbers are all ball-park, but I figure they’re on the low side.