Passover to Pentecost – Food        Week 2 Day 6

Your children will be shepherds for forty years. Numbers 14: 33 (NIV)

Food has been a reoccurring topic so I thought we needed to put these thoughts together in a post.  Israel and the rabble with them did a lot of complaining about the food they had and the food they remembered.  Their diet was probably simple compared to many of our daily meals, but the thoughts of food carry powerful emotions.

The three main elements for the Passover meal were unleavened bread (no yeast/sin), bitter herbs to represent slavery, and the lamb (the sacrifice and the protector).  The typology of the unleavened bread and lamb points to Jesus our sinless sacrifice.

After the second Passover, the people that came with them out of Egypt got the people all worked up about food.  They remembered the fish, cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic they had in Egypt.  And it was free!  I guess they forgot about slavery, plus the rabble could have left and gone back to Egypt.

Quail is mentioned twice in Scripture as the meat that God gave the people – Exodus 16 and Numbers 11.  It is interesting that both of these were in the days right after Passover in the time of the Counting of the Omer.  Even today there are large migrations of quail over this general area.

Exodus 12 talks about the large herds of livestock they brought with them as they left Egypt.  So they would have had milk (cheese) and meat as a regular part of their diet.  Since God (the cloud) could move at any time planting crops would have been useless.  This lifestyle was part of the burden the children were to carry because of the complaining of the parents.

Manna, the “what is it” food of the Bible; it looked like dried tree sap and tasted liked olive oil and coriander seed.  It would not keep overnight and had to be picked up fresh every day.  This miraculous food is a shadow of Jesus.  It is referred to as manna and the bread of Heaven in several places in the Old and New Testament.  Some references for this are found in Psalm 105:40, Nehemiah 9:15, and John 6.  In Hebrews 9:4 an omer of manna is mentioned again as being in the Ark and then in Revelations 2:17 manna will be given to those who overcome.