Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

Daily bread? Why bread? Why not, say, broccoli or carrots or cake? Why does our LORD teach us to pray, Give us this day our daily bread (Matt. 6:11) ? 

The fourth petition of the prayer our LORD taught us has a history, like everything else in the Bible. It goes back to the Exodus of the Children of Israel from bondage and slavery in Egypt in the 13th century B.C. Once they made it to the wilderness area between Egypt and the promised land they believed they were in big trouble. And they immediately began to complain about it.

And the whole congregation of the people of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness, and the people of Israel said to them, "Would that we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the meat pots and ate bread to the full, for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger." - Exod. 16:2-3 ESV

The LORD's response to this grumbling disbelief was to "rain bread from heaven" for them. Every day they were to "gather a day's portion"—no more—so that the LORD might test their faith in Him and whether they were willing to walk in His commands. On the sixth day they were to gather twice as much, for on the seventh day they were to rest (Exod. 16:4-7, 21-27).

And what was this strange food that appeared with the morning dew? No one could tell. This is why they said to one another in Hebrew, "Man hu?" What is it?
Moses reply was simple and to the point,

"It is the bread that the LORD has given you to eat. This is what the LORD has commanded: 'Gather of it, each one of you, as much as he can eat. You shall each take an , according to the number of the persons that each of you has in his tent.'" - Exod. 16:15-16 ESV 
omer

An omer was equal to a couple quarts in our terms. Some gathered more, some less, but they discovered that whoever gathered much had nothing left over for the next day and whoever gathered little had quite enough nevertheless. Some tried to save it over to the next day, but they soon found that it bred worms and stank. And they also learned that it melted in the sun's heat. So it was a day by day existence. They were completely dependent upon the blessings of the LORD, for there was little else to eat in that wild, deserted area.

Many have offered guesses about Manna, but they remain but guesses. Here is one such, based upon a 2010 NY Times article.

The Bible describes it as being “like coriander seed,” and “white, and its taste was like wafers with honey.” 

But as miraculous as its biblical apparition may seem, manna is real and some chefs have been cooking with it. 

The dozens of varieties of what are called mannas have two things in common. They are sweet and, as in the Bible, they appear as if delivered by providence, without cultivation. 

Most of this manna is either dried plant sap extruded from tiny holes chewed out by almost invisible bugs, or a honeydew excreted by bugs that eat the sap. 

Rarer are the mannas not from sap, including Trehala manna, the sweet-tasting cocoon of the Larinus maculates beetle from Turkey; and manna-lichen (Lecanora esculenta), which occasionally dries up and blows around to form semisweet clouds out of which manna settles into drifts from western Greece to the central Asian steppe. 

Mannas form best in extremely dry climates — like the Middle East’s — where sap oozes at night and dries up in the morning. The favored theory on what the Israelites called manna is the sap of a tamarisk tree. 

In Calabria and Sicily, Italian farmers cut the bark of the flowering ash (Fraxinus ornus) to get the dried sap, the only domesticated form of manna. Italian apothecaries used it for centuries as a laxative, and other mannas have been used for medicinal purposes.

I suppose its OK to claim to know what Manna was. The real point is that it was always there for them throughout the 40 years before they claimed the land promised to Abraham and his descendants (Genesis 13:14-18).

Jesus' prayer for today's bread has all this in mind. More about this in my next post.