The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the LORD’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.” – Exodus 16:3

Today’s Scripture Reading (August 26, 2018): Exodus 16

A local restaurant recently organized an excursion into the city’s River Valley Park system in search of food. The idea behind the program was to allow people to understand how much food grows even within a large city. There was also an element of trying to produce an understanding that if a restaurant majors in food that is locally available, throughout the various seasons, that that menu can be exciting even with the absence of more exotically grown foods.

After the excursion into the valley, the chef prepared a meal with what the hikers had found, much of which they did not even know was edible. The meal that resulted from the tour included mushrooms on toast, foraged cold brew tea, tumbleweed salad, foraged onion dumplings, roasted broccoli and a mixed berry clafoutis. All cooked with locally available ingredients.

Israel was running out of food. That is that the food that they had brought with them from Egypt was coming to an end. That meant that the next step on their journey was going to have to be sustained by what they could gather along the way. The problem was that the slaves had essentially spent their lives on building projects in Egypt. They knew how to gather straw to make bricks. They knew how to structure the bricks to make a building. Just a note, it is highly unlikely that the Israelite slaves were used to build the pyramids, as some have suggested. The time period does not match. But, there is no doubt that the slaves were used in building projects of some kind inside of Egypt. What the slaves did not know was how to identify edible plants as they wandered in the wilderness. And now, as the food began to run out, that was exactly what was going to be required of them.

Nostalgia is special. It causes us to remember things that were never really there. And there is much nostalgia in the memories of the children of Israel. Two things seem to be true in this passage. The first is that food was never as readily available as it was in their remembering of Egypt. Life had been hard, and Israel had suffered much at the hands of the Egyptians, which is why they had cried out to God in the first place. The other truth was that they had never gone without food. Not even now were they left hungry. What caused the abrupt change from singing to complaining was the fear that they might go hungry; the fear that now they could see the end of their food provisions.

Of course, starvation was never in God’s plan. He would provide. The food would be different from what they ate in Egypt, but it would still provide for their basic nutritional needs. But Israel needed to be able to lift up their eyes and see the food that was all around them. They needed to be willing to forage for what God was going to give to them.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Exodus 17