| Be-Shallach 5762, Exodus 13:17-17:16
Shabbat Shalom-
Is there a difference between history and reality? I mean, if history
is our recollection and reconstruction of the past, do not forgetting details
and finding sources have a place in how we tell our stories? History,
really, is just a more scientific version of the folk-histories which we have
always known. That being said, when our experience contradicts a recorded
past event, do we reinterpret our experience, the event, or the medium which
informed us of the event?
The Bible is replete with these types of histories. Where was the
Garden of Eden? Did people really live hundreds of years? Was Joseph
really second-in-command in Egypt? Could Goshen in northeastern Egypt have
supported some 2 million Hebrew slaves in the 13th century B.C.E.? Some
situations, however, are so far removed from our experience that we wouldn’t
even try to attribute to them a natural explanation. Does anyone ever doubt that
God spoke to Moses from a burning bush that was not consumed without throwing
the entire Biblical narrative into disrepute?
One well-known miracle, the manna from heaven, has been so miraculously
expounded over the millennia that many would be inclined to put it in the
unquestionable-miracle category. However, a return to the land of the Bible and
an increasingly scientific study of ancient documents have added a new question
to the story: what was manna really?
In grade school I learned that manna was a magical food that tasted like
whatever you wanted at the moment, a heavenly grain. Years later, in a
Biblical studies class with Dr. Jeffery Tigay, I was to write a paper on how new
discoveries helped us understand ancient texts. The JPS commentary
explained that attempts had been made to explain manna as either a sugary
insect-extract in the southern Sinai peninsula or a floating sugary lichen but
that none of these items fully matched the Biblical account. I asked, for
example, how the manna could be cooked (16:23, Num 11:8) if it melted in the sun
(16:22)? And hence a paper was born.
I read and researched about the rampant debate going on for the past century
about what manna might be and concluded that everyone seemed to be based on one
thorough expedition by a fellow who wasn’t very respectful of the Biblical text.
But it was hard to ignore what he found: dramatic physical and and
linguistic similarities in a sugary substance the Bedouins called ‘manna from
Heaven’ in precisely the region and season in which the story (Exodus 16) takes
place. No matter how well this sugary insect extract matched the manna’s
physical description, it could never match the miraculous descriptions
surrounding the story, the later traditions in the Bible, or the fantastical
homilies we have recorded from the earliest days up until the present time.
What does it mean that I concluded that manna is an entirely natural
phenomena that falls to this day if I also concluded that the Biblical manna
could not have existed in historical time by scientific standards? Does
that mean that the Bible is full of lies? No, because then it would not
have included the physical descriptions that led to my identification of
manna. It seems, as one can regularly conclude about the Bible, that it is
a pedagogic reading of historical happenings through the lens of God’s
involvement in history.
A religious rationalist such as myself would see the manna story as something
wonderful and cherished for generations eventually brought to teach Gods’
greatness along with the history of the Hebrews. My respect for the text
is not hurt by seeing it as part of an appropriation of cherished history.
I do not have to bend my experience and rationalize that nature ‘then’ was
different than ‘now’ or that God acted in history ‘then’ in obvious ways and
miracles but not today. By seeing the text as the result of combining the
folk-history with a love of God, one cannot but come to respect it even
more. There does not need to be a difference between history and
experience. In fact, reading the Bible as a text that uses history rather
than a text of history adds respect to our own faculties of reason and
experience while maintaining and perhaps increasing that of the text. We
need not bend our perceptions or create distinctions to appreciate the Bible. We
must merely trust our perceptions and be respectful of the text that has
garnered so much respect and study for generations.
Have a caring week!
Benjamin Fleischer
See the draft paper here.
I will update it when I get my corrected copy back from home 
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