Manna
Sometimes I read a little bit of the Bible before bedtime, mostly because I don’t know what’s in it. Growing up Catholic, we didn’t go to vacation Bible school, and if we did read the Bible, we tended to stick with the New Testament. So lately I’ve been reading Exodus, and it’s a lot different than the Cecil B. Demille version. For instance, I didn’t remember Moses’ wife being named Zipporah and his father-in-law being Jethro. I think they were called Susan and Bob in the movie. And I thought there were only seven or eight plagues but, no, there were 10. Some of them were just redundant. In the seventh plague, huge hail rained down from the sky and then caught the ground on fire. You could assume that that would pretty much obliterate all the crops, but then the eighth plague, locusts, devoured whatever was left. And what was the frog plague supposed to do, anyway?
But what’s surprised me most is the part about manna, the bread that fell from heaven. It would appear in the morning with the dew and melt in the midday sun. If you left it out too long it would get wormy, but it tasted like honey. So it was more like cookies from heaven. But here’s the line that really gets me: “The Israelites ate manna for forty years.” Holy redundancy, Batman.
I was thinking about manna yesterday as we picked up pecans out of the back yard. An autumn wind blew hard and steady all day, raining pecans from the heavens. Hispanic ladies walked up and down the street with their buckets. Cars pulled over on the side of the road by Highway 90 so people could scour the roadside park. Forty years ago when the October wind blew hard, people in this county picked pecans. They’ll be doing it 40 years from now.
Posted: October 24th, 2010 under God.
Comments & Backsass: 3
