Israel reckoned with a guiding hand in the desert that she could not control and did not often comprehend. The rhetoric of Moses’ speeches on Moab’s plains takes pains to exclude all causes within Israel herself that might explain YHWH’s outlandish affection for her. Simply, the attraction is mysterious.
So too do the data and the mechanics that kept Israel fed during her desert wanderings lie almost wholly on the side of YHWH’s care. Nothing is credited to Israel’s ingenuity.
He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.
YHWH’s pedagogy with his infant people lingers regularly over the necessity of recognizing YHWH’s invisible hand. Yet the notion never leads in the direction of esoteric speculation or of prodding at the borders of human knowledge so as to decipher what moves that hand, when, and just how. Rather Israel is encouraged towards gratitude for a protective and providing covering that she does not deserve and cannot manufacture.
Israel knew nothing of manna. What is is, where it comes from, why it goes away, how to preserve it. Manna was provision from outside Israel’s concentric circles of mastery.
No YHWH, no manna. The arithmetic of grace is sometimes that simple.
‘You ate manna that you did not know.’ The text addresses this people at the edge of a river that separates a wandering to which they had grown accustomed from a conquest and settlement that tax their capacity to trust. One gathers that there would be manna, or something like it, on the other side of the river as well.
Something sustaining. Something they’d never known. Something that comes from nowhere and goes away when stomachs have ceased their growling.
Canter Bridge 
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