The Israelites Gathering Manna in the Desert, oil on wood by Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1626–27; in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California.
Everything we've been taught about how to imagine God providing for humanity, has been through the paradigm of patriarchal energy.
A king providing for his subjects.
A shepherd tending his flock.
A father feeding his children.
But what if one of the most famous stories of divine provision in the Bible preserves something far older? Something deeply maternal. Something that the ancient world would have immediately recognized, but that modern readers have largely forgotten.
Let's talk about manna.
Like many of us who grew up hearing the story, I imagined manna as heavenly bread magickally appearing on the ground each morning. A divine bakery delivery service, if you will. But that's not actually what the biblical text describes.
The Israelites did not wake up to fresh loaves.
They woke up to a mysterious substance that had to be gathered, sorted, ground, pounded, cooked, and transformed into food.
Edible manna lichen (Lecanora allophana).
In other words, God did not provide the finished meal.
God provided the raw materials.
And in the ancient world, there was one group of people who specialized in transforming the raw materials of creation into nourishment:
Women.
This isn't a political statement. It's an anthropological observation.
For most of human history, women were the keepers of food technology. While men often hunted, herded, plowed, or harvested, it was women who performed the sacred labor of transformation. They gathered grains, ground flour on stone querns, fermented beverages, baked bread, rendered fats, preserved harvests, and sustained entire communities through skills passed from mother to daughter over countless generations.
Women were the original alchemists of survival.
This reality becomes even more fascinating when we remember that the Hebrew Bible preserves numerous maternal images of God that are often overshadowed by later theological traditions.
God is compared to a woman in labor.
God is compared to a mother nursing her child.
God is compared to a mother comforting her children.
Even the divine act of provision is frequently described through the language of nourishment, birth, and sustenance.
The ancient Israelites may not have conceptualized God as "female," but they certainly understood that the divine could be experienced through both paternal and maternal forms of care.
And perhaps nowhere is this more beautifully illustrated than in the wilderness.
Because manna was not simply food.
Manna was potential.
It was raw creation awaiting transformation.
And every morning, the people gathered this mysterious gift from heaven and engaged in an act as old as humanity itself: taking what the divine had provided and transforming it into life.
For thousands of years, this work belonged primarily to women.
Which raises a fascinating question:
When the Israelites gathered manna and turned it into bread, were they participating in a form of divine provision that ancient people would have instinctively recognized as maternal?
I think they may have been.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons the story of manna has endured for millennia. It doesn't depict a distant deity issuing provisions from a throne. It depicts a God who nourishes in the same way mothers have always nourished: by providing the substance of life and entrusting loving hands to transform it into sustenance.
Maybe the miracle of manna wasn't simply that God fed Israel.
Maybe the miracle was that God revealed a part of the divine nature that we have spent centuries forgetting.
A God who nurtures.
A God who feeds.
A God who transforms.
A God whose provision, at least in this story, bears the unmistakable imprint of the sacred feminine.
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