What Does Exodus 16:31 Mean?
And the house of Israel called its name Manna. It was like coriander seed, white, and its taste was like wafers made with honey.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
And the house of Israel called the name thereof Manna: and it was like coriander seed, white; and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey.THE KEY
The name Manna preserves the question “What is it?” and its sweetness makes the unknown something the body can recognize.
THE MEANING
Provision can reach you before you can explain it: here it is white, seedlike, and sweet. The name holds the question open while its taste makes the gift perceptible.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
Only what I can explain can nourish me.
THE ROOT
טַעְמוֹ
ṭaʿmō
GROWS FROM
טעם
To taste or sample; by extension, to perceive or discern.
“taste” in this verse is ṭaʿmō. This root holds literal tasting together with sense and discernment. The sweetness makes the question held in Manna’s name perceptible through experience, before explanation.
ALSO GROWS
ṭāʿam: The verb names tasting or sampling directly.
טָעַם
The manna’s sweetness is encountered through the senses.
ṭaʿam: The noun can name taste, sense, or judgment.
טַעַם
The same root lets taste carry the further sense of perceiving.
זֶרַע
zeraʿ
GROWS FROM
זרע
To sow.
The word translated “seed” also names offspring, holding both what is sown and what comes from it. Manna is compared to coriander seed, so the image carries the language of seed and continuation without calling the manna itself a seed.
ALSO GROWS
zāraʿ: To scatter or plant seed.
זָרַע
It reveals the action held in the seed image.
zeraʿ: Seed, or the descendants that come from it.
זֶרַע
The comparison evokes both the small seed and its potential continuation.
THE PATTERN
Provision can nourish before its nature is fully understood, and tasting becomes a way of knowing.
And when the children of Israel saw it, they said to one another, Manna, what is it? For they did not know what it was. And Moses said to them, This is the bread which the LORD has given you to eat.And he bent you low, and made you hunger, and fed you with manna, which you had never perceived, nor had your fathers, so that he might make you perceive that humankind does not live by bread alone, but by every word that goes out from the mouth of the LORD does humankind live.If indeed you have tasted that the LORD is good.THE THREAD
O taste and see that the LORD is good. Flourishing is the strong one who takes shelter in him.The same Hebrew root, טעם (ṭaʿam, “taste, perceive”), appears in the manna’s taste and the invitation to taste the LORD’s goodness. Here, tasting becomes a way of discerning what is good through direct encounter.
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