Strata: What’s for Dinner? Restaurants Put Manna on the Menu

Judging by the number of results returned in a search on Amazon.com, there is a lot of popular (and scholarly) interest in food from the Bible and the ancient world—whether it’s the scholar who recreated the recipe for an Assyrian stew from an ancient cuneiform tablet (he substituted a can of Guinness where the original called for lamb’s blood) to entire cookbooks devoted to menus for meals mentioned in the Bible (e.g., the dinner Jacob made for his father, Isaac, in order to steal Esau’s blessing, as well as the feast prepared to celebrate the return of the Prodigal Son in the famous parable from Luke’s gospel). And now, thanks to a few experimental chefs at New York City restaurants, Biblical “foodies” can see if they have a taste for manna, that miraculous food that sustained the children of Israel in the Sinai desert (Exodus 16; Numbers 11).