On the road...again!!!
Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams
Chronicles of a Footloose Forester
By Dick Pellek

Manna From The Heavens

Unless you are a biblical scholar, chances are that your understanding of the Bible has lots of gaps about some specific passages and circumstances that you have never personally experienced.  Indeed, faith in the spirit of the Bible is pretty much a given among Christians, but that does not mean that we definitely know exactly what has been written.  After all, the Christian Bible is actually a compilation of 60 different books, all written by different people who had different writing styles; not to mention the many interpretations and translations over the millennia have altered some words and their meanings.

Manna from heaven is first and foremost, a mystical concept that does have some factual truth to go along with many presumptions about people who fasted for 40 days and 40 nights in the desert.  The bible ascribes fasting in the desert to more than one group, and that is easy to accept because deserts do not naturally have an abundance of food.  Yet, several modern and contemporary ethnic groups continue to live in desert environments and subsist, in some measure, on the food resources found in their desert landscapes.

A few people hold a vague view of where manna comes from

Specifics aside, because different deserts in disparate latitudes exhibit dissimilar plant taxa, it would not be improper to merely speculate that the desertic regions that are mentioned in the Bible contained some edible plants and fungi that would have been known to sojourners who were not permanent residents there.  One other thing, the definition of desert has not been precise among most non-scientists; hence, some so-called deserts have a relative abundance of plant life, and others do not.  The broad region of the Middle East about which several biblical stories are written is in no way a homogeneously uniform desert as regards plant life.  The presence or absence of permanent water sources, as well as rainfall, makes all the difference.    

So, what is manna?  Where did it originate? From the heavens? Or from the ground where wanderers in the desert were nourished, even in their fasting?  For starters, there are a few different tree species of the plant family Fabaceae that are called manna trees.  Not all of them, except one, grow naturally in the Middle East and none of them have been associated with an edible entity known as manna.  It is not too early in this personal speculation by the Footloose Forester to write off all of them.  More likely suspects are the French Tamarisk (Tamarix gallica) which forms an edible white, honey-like substance on its stem; or the Manna Ash (Fraxinus ornis) which has a sweet and creamy white sap. But did the trees or their edible saps come from the heavens?

Tamarix gallica, the manna tree

One point of speculation is that several kinds of edibles made up the expanded diets of the Israelites in the desert. There may have been raw honey from an occasional honeycomb; there would have been termites that were easy to collect, once a highly visible termite mound was located.  Toasted termites were easy enough to prepare, as the Footloose Forester can attest.  And the taste is not objectionable.  Many deserts have hundreds of termite mounds.  And finally, there probably were mushrooms (in season) in the vicinity of the termite mounds. When termites emerge from the ground, termite mushrooms soon pop up around the mounds, themselves.  And termite mushrooms are delicious.  The Israelites might have thought that the mushrooms that suddenly appeared had descended from the heavens.