The Manna and Coriander Seed
Recently, while reading through the book of Exodus, I came to the passage that describes the Israelites receiving the manna from heaven during their desert wanderings. I must have read this verse a hundred times before, but something new caught my eye:
Now the house of Israel called its name manna. It was like coriander seed, white, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey (Ex. 16:31).
As a novice gardener, the detail that the manna was like coriander seed suddenly stood out to me. Coriander seed, the seed of the herb cilantro, is not special in any way that I could think of at first blush. A small, brown and wrinkly seed of spherical shape, it does not have any characteristic that would seem to fit nicely into the biblical narrative. The taste of the food being likened to honey seems significant enough; honey was a delicacy in the ancient world (one of the only sweeteners) and the manna was also to be a foretaste of the promised land to which the Israelites were travelling, a land “flowing with milk and honey” (Ex. 3:17). But why is the manna said to be “like coriander seed”? And if the manna tasted like honey, in what way was it “like” coriander? Not in color, it seems, as the book of Numbers tells us:
Now the manna was like coriander seed, and its appearance like that of bdellium (Num. 11:7).
Bdellium is white, unlike the brown coriander seed (the relationship between manna and a white stone also appears in Rev. 2:17). It seems, therefore, that taking Exodus and Numbers together we can conclude that the manna was like coriander neither in taste (which was like honey) nor in appearance (which was as bdellium). What, then, can we make of this strange reference to coriander? Searching through commentaries, much to my chagrin, it seemed that this detail is usually passed over without a comment. But how could it be that the reference to honey was considered to be a noteworthy detail, and yet the coriander was deemed irrelevant? Following my curiosity about coriander, as it turned out, was an instructive lesson in biblical translation and about the effort we must make to access the world of the Bible and its images.
Reading further into scholarship on the plants of the Bible, one option presented itself: to suggest that the translators have simply misidentified the seed. Despite the seemingly smooth translation of the passage to English readers of the Bible, scholars of the Old Testament often have to make an educated guess when it comes to plants, animals and agricultural terms that might only appear once in the whole Old Testament and that are references belonging an agrarian society thousands of years old. The word coriander, in fact, appears only in the passages cited in Exodus and Numbers. Having no comparison for the word in Hebrew, then, translators must rely on the early Latin and Greek translations to corroborate the meaning of the word.
This option appears most logical to German scholar Immanuel Löw, who wrote a veritable magnum opus in German on the plants of the Bible (called Die Flora der Juden, in four volumes). He argues that the Hebrew word refers not to coriander, but to “tamarisk manna.” Tamarisk manna is a secretion left on the tamarisk tree by insects, which solidifies into a thick, sweet substance. He provides a long linguistic case for why this confusion might have taken place, and the theory that the biblical manna is related to tamarisk manna seems to have gained some traction, despite the fact that tamarisk manna does not have many of the features of biblical manna (perhaps, most notably, it cannot be ground and made into cakes; cf. Num. 11:8).
To me, however, the possibility of a mistranslation does not seem very likely. Unlike many other plants or agricultural words, all of the early sources we have – the Septuagint (an early Greek translation of the Old Testament), the Vulgate (an early Latin translation of the Bible) and the Samaritan Pentateuch (an alternate attestation to the Old Testament in Samaritan characters) all report that the manna was like coriander. In other words, there does not seem to have been any debate among ancient translators about the term. Moreover, coriander was certainly present in Israel and its environs during the time period in which the Old Testament was taking shape, in fact, the oldest known coriander seeds were found there. Whether or not tamarisk manna has some relationship to the manna the Israelites ate in the desert, it still seems that the biblical authors wished to liken it to coriander.
There are other options to make sense of this reference to coriander, and perhaps the most obvious is to suggest that the shape of the manna is like that of coriander. Coriander is round, almost a perfect sphere, and few seeds have this nice, globular shape – which might be why this particular seed is invoked to describe the manna. Fourth century author Sulpicius Severus takes the reference to coriander to refer to the physical form of the manna – that it was “a sort of pod…a coriander-seed of snowy whiteness.”[1] There is also at least one rabbinic source (which identifies the seed with flax) that emphasizes that the manna was round.[2] If indeed the shape (and perhaps size) of the manna is indicated by the reference to coriander, it could help to explain the seemingly grain-like quality that allows the manna to be ground into meal.
If the key point of comparison between coriander and manna is roundness, then perhaps the reference can also shed light on the form the Eucharist has taken in the Western tradition. Even in the writings of some of the earliest Christians, the manna is seen as a foreshadowing of the Eucharist. For example, Cyprian of Carthage (3rdcentury bishop) writes: “we see the sacrament celebrated in Exodus, when the manna flowed down from heaven, and, prefiguring the things to come, showed forth the nourishment of the heavenly bread and the food of the coming Christ.”[3] If, then, manna was understood as white, wafer-like and round, and also as the most important type of the Eucharist in the Old Testament, we can also see how those elements could have informed the appearance of the Eucharist in the West. Certainly many artistic representations of the Israelites gathering manna would bring to the mind of a modern Catholic Eucharistic hosts raining down from heaven.
In the end, I was somewhat disappointed that I did not come to some revelation about the deeper significance of the coriander-like manna. But whatever the case may be – whether coriander is a mistranslation, whether it indicates the shape and size of the manna or its preciousness (like that of a fine spice) – the biblical account is not nearly so straightforward or unsophisticated as it might seem at first glance. If we want to understand the Scriptures, which God ordained to be written at particular times and in particular places, we too have to commit ourselves to the particulars and to the discovery of what God has hidden in his word.
