Manna Is Real and Not So Heavenly

It was 1968, just a few months after the end of the Six-Day War, when Avinoam Danin, the late professor of botany, embarked on an expedition to the Sinai Desert, the historic land recently taken by Israel from Egypt. Danin and his colleagues at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem noticed white drops on the green stem of a desert shrub. The plant, Haloxylon salicornicum, is found all over the Middle East. "We asked a passing Bedouin: 'What is this?'" Danin wrote many years later in an article published on the website Flora of Israel Online. The Bedouin responded: "This is mann-Rimth that you ate when you left Egypt." The Rimth shrub is the Bedouin name for the Haloxylon salicornicum. Was this the answer, Danin wondered, to a thousands-years-old mystery about the miraculous food from heaven that sustained the people of Israel on their way to the promised land?