Texts in Conversation
Rabbinic tradition in Midrash Lekach Tov describes God as a mother feeding her child, with the manna compared to milk that sustains everyone. Matthew uses a similar image when Jesus says God longs to gather Jerusalem like a hen protecting her young.
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Matthew 23:36
New Testament
34 so that on you will come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. 35 I tell you the truth, this generation will be held responsible for all these things! 36 “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to you! How often I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you would have none of it! 37 Look, your house is left to you desolate! 38 For I tell you, you will not see me from now until you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!’”
Date: 70-90 C.E. (based on scholarly estimates)
Source
Midrash Lekach Tov
Rabbinic
When the manna would fall upon the camp at night, the dew would first descend and spread out as if it were a fine cloth, so that the manna would not become soiled. Then the manna would descend upon it, and afterward another layer of dew would come upon it from above, as it says, ‘When the dew fell upon the camp at night, the manna fell upon it’ (Numbers 11:9). The dew came to protect the manna from the snakes and scorpions. The dew resembled a woman's breast: just as an infant finds nourishment there, so too the manna came down between layers of dew, and each person would open the door of his tent and find his sustenance prepared, ready for eating and drinking, fresh as though drawn from the sun and the moon.
Date: 1105 C.E. (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... the relationship between God and the people of Israel in their formative years is imagined in rabbinic texts as one in which feeding—perhaps the quintessential form of quotidian caregiving—is a complex site where frustration, nurture, love, and burden all coexist, much as they do for human caregivers. The manna of Exodus 16 is likened to mother’s milk, the Israelites’ first food after their “birth” as a nation: “Just as the breast is the primary food for the baby, and all other food is secondary, so too the manna was primary and all other food was secondary” (Pesikta Zutarta [Midrash Lekach Tov], Bamidbar Beha’alotekha). The rabbis imagine the manna itself in maternal terms, but just as importantly, they invoke the fraught activities of feeding and being fed. As if to forestall the fantasy of ever-harmonious synchronicity between nursing mother and suckling child, biblical and midrashic narratives do not envisage feeding as a site of pacific mutual exchange; they recognize the gap between the infant’s experience of being fed and the parent’s physical and emotional experience of feeding. The manna is associated with God’s munificence and nurture, but it simultaneously signifies the challenges of nurturing and the learning curve required for the divine parent: when Israel devours too much milk-manna at the wrong time, God draws limits (Exodus 16:28), just as a breastfeeding mother helps her baby learn to take milk, and learns how to give it, in the early days of their relationship ..."
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