StrongerBible

manna

μάννα

GreekG3131“manna”

Appears 5 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Jhn 6:31Jhn 6:49Jhn 6:58Heb 9:4Rev 2:17
Word studyMAHN-nahnoun

What manna means

manna: the bread-like food God supplied for Israel to eat during the wilderness years, which the New Testament takes up as the picture of bread from heaven

TranslatabilityUntranslatableCertaintySettled

This word is not really a Greek word. It is the Hebrew name for the wilderness food spelled out in Greek letters, and English later borrowed it again in the same way, as "manna". Every New Testament writer who uses it is reaching back to a single story: the years when Israel woke each morning to find a flaky, seed-sized food lying on the ground, gathered only as much as each person could eat that day, and lived on it until they crossed into the promised land.

By the first century that story had grown into a rich tradition, and the New Testament pulls it in three directions:

  • In the long exchange at Capernaum the crowd offers the manna as Moses' credential, quoting their scriptures back to Jesus, and he answers that the ancestors who ate it still died while he is the living bread that came down from heaven.
  • Hebrews lists it among the furnishings of the old sanctuary, a portion sealed in a gold jar inside the covenant chest as a relic of an arrangement now past.
  • Revelation turns it forward, promising "the hidden manna" to whoever holds out under pressure, drawing on a Jewish hope that the jar put out of sight long ago would be brought out again when God finally set things right.

So the word always names the same substance, but in the New Testament it almost never stays a plain food word. Set beside ordinary bread (ἄρτος), it marks the difference between what God once supplied to keep one generation alive and what he gives that lasts.

Nuances

1athe wilderness food itself: the bread from heaven Israel's ancestors ate day after day in the desert
Jhn 6:31Jhn 6:49Jhn 6:58
1bthat same food kept as a memorial: the portion sealed in a gold jar inside the covenant chest
Heb 9:4
1cmanna as a gift still to be given: the hidden manna held in reserve for those who hold out
Rev 2:17

What scholars say about manna

BDAG treats μάννα as an indeclinable Semitic loanword taken over from Hebrew מָן through the Septuagint, denoting the wilderness food, and lists Rev 2:17 separately as the eschatological "hidden manna." Maiberger's TDOT article and his monograph Das Manna trace the Hebrew term from a Sinai substance name into a theological etiology of heavenly provision, and the Greek word inherits that trajectory already theologized: Ps 78:25 LXX renders לֶחֶם אַבִּירִים as ἄρτον ἀγγέλων, and Wis 16:20 calls manna ἀγγέλων τροφήν, adapted to every taste. Borgen's Bread from Heaven argued that John 6:31 to 58 is built as a midrashic homily on the manna lemma, moving from a sapiential to a sacramental application; Brown follows the homiletic analysis in substance while weighing the eucharistic reference of vv. 51 to 58 more cautiously. On Rev 2:17 Beale and Koester read τοῦ μάννα τοῦ κεκρυμμένου against the Second Temple hidden-manna tradition (2 Macc 2:4 to 8; 2 Bar 29:8; the Palestinian Targums on Exod 16, catalogued by Malina), as messianic-banquet imagery set polemically over against the idol food of Rev 2:14. Heb 9:4 locates the στάμνος χρυσῆ holding the manna among the furnishings of the first-covenant sanctuary now superseded, and 1 Cor 10:3, though it uses βρῶμα rather than μάννα, supplies the Pauline typological reading of the same provision.

Sources

  • BDAG, s.v. μάνναlexicon
  • Paul Maiberger, "מָן," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, vol. 8 (Eerdmans, 1997)theological-dictionary
  • Paul Maiberger, Das Manna: Eine literarische, etymologische und naturkundliche Untersuchung, 2 vols. (Harrassowitz, 1983)monograph
  • Peder Borgen, Bread from Heaven: An Exegetical Study of the Concept of Manna in the Gospel of John and the Writings of Philo, NovTSup 10 (Brill, 1965)monograph
  • Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John I to XII, AB 29 (Doubleday, 1966), 261 to 304commentary
  • G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation, NIGTC (Eerdmans, 1999), 251 to 253commentary
  • Craig R. Koester, Revelation, AYB 38A (Yale University Press, 2014), 290 to 293commentary
  • Bruce J. Malina, The Palestinian Manna Tradition, AGSU 7 (Brill, 1968)monograph
  • Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGTC (Eerdmans, 2000), 723 to 730commentary

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of μάννα

accusative n s

μάννα

Jhn 6:31, Jhn 6:49, Jhn 6:58, Heb 9:4

genitive n s

μάννα

Rev 2:17