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Problematic Terminology of the Manna Pericope (Exod 16:14-15) in the Light of Medieval Jewish Commentators and Biblical Hebrew Philology

Summary

Dihi examines two hard spots in the manna story of Exod 16:14-15. The first is the adjective mĕḥuspās, which occurs only here in the Bible. The second is the word man in the exclamation man hû'. The paper sets readings by medieval Jewish exegetes and grammarians (Saadya Gaon, Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Ibn Janāḥ, Radaq, Nachmanides) beside ancient versions (Onqelos, Peshitta, Septuagint) and modern dictionaries and comparative Semitic evidence. The goal is to judge which medieval proposal holds up best under current philology. The method compares competing root analyses and checks them against what the text says elsewhere about manna: white, like coriander seed, compared to bdellium, tasting of honey wafers or rich cream. Of four medieval readings of mĕḥuspās, modern research supports two, "rounded" and "uncovered." Two medieval commentators already took man as an interrogative pronoun, which is the standard modern view. The author argues that modern lexicography loses value when it ignores medieval scholarship, because that scholarship often reached the right answer centuries earlier without comparative linguistic tools.

Key points

  • The noun for manna appears 14 times in the Bible. Mĕḥuspās is a hapax legomenon, and the Septuagint leaves it untranslated, using the coriander comparison from elsewhere in its place.
  • The "roundish" reading comes from Saadya, who rendered it with Arabic mudaḥraj. Ibn Ezra, Ibn Janāḥ and Radaq share it and treat the word as a quadriliteral root (ḥ-s-p-s).
  • The "uncovered/peeled" reading goes back to Onqelos and Rashi. Nachmanides follows it by deriving the word from the root ḥ-ś-p with a doubled second consonant. Ibn Ezra objects that no root doubles only its second letter.
  • The Talmud gives homiletic explanations: an acronym, and a numerical value of 248, the traditional count of human limbs. The Peshitta contains two renderings ("peeled" and "covered") that seem to contradict each other.
  • The final conclusion is that "rounded" and "uncovered" are both philologically defensible, and man in man hû' is best read as "what?"

Interesting ideas

  • I1. For a word with a single occurrence, gather every description of the same referent elsewhere in the text and use these as constraints to rank candidate meanings. — For Mova (world): unknown nouns could get provisional attributes from co-referring descriptions across the whole text, and interpretations that conflict with those attributes would be filtered out.
  • I2. A proposed derivation can be rejected if its morphological pattern is never attested elsewhere, as Ibn Ezra did with second-letter doubling. — For Mova (tokens): the morphology analyzer could penalize lemma or derivation hypotheses whose pattern has no precedent in the lexicon, and log that reason as an explanation.
  • I3. A witness that declines to translate, or that gives contradictory renderings, is a signal of difficulty and not just missing data. — For Mova (learn): in silver data, abstentions or self-contradictory outputs from a witness parser could mark an item as low-confidence instead of being outvoted.
  • I4. Man hû' turns out to be a question ("what is it?") that later serves as a name, so a function word's category decides how the whole scene is read. — For Mova (frames): speech-act detection could check whether a "naming" utterance is actually an interrogative, which would change the frame from labeling to asking.
  • I5. The paper keeps homiletic readings (acronym, numerical value) apart from philological ones instead of mixing them. — For Mova (answer): explanations could be tagged by type (literal versus interpretive layer), so readers answering fable or tale questions do not present allegorical readings as literal facts.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI https://doi.org/10.17159/2312-3621/2020/v33n2a3

@inproceedings{dihi2020problematic,
  title = {{Problematic Terminology of the Manna Pericope (Exod 16:14-15) in the Light of Medieval Jewish Commentators and Biblical Hebrew Philology}},
  author = {Dihi, Haim},
  booktitle = {Old Testament Essays 33},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.17159/2312-3621/2020/v33n2a3},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17159/2312-3621/2020/v33n2a3}
}

References

3 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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