WHAT IS MANNA ?

Greymouth Evening Star, 10 August 1928, Page 3

WHAT IS MANNA ?

THE PROBLEM SOLVED. The Hebrew University has decided to establish a zoological laboratory on Mount. Scopus under the direction of Dr F. S. Bodenheimer, formerly chief entomologist of tho Agricultural Experimental Station bf the Zionist • Organisation. Dr Bodenheimer caused much discussion in scientific circles last year by his announcement that manna, (lie miraculous food which rained from heaven on the Jews in I heir forty years’ wandering in the desert, is not, as was commonly believed, an exudation of the tamarisk tree, but. is the secretion of a scale insect, a parasite of that tree. Details of his discovery were given in a paper which Dr Bodenheimer read last autumn before the Entomological Congress in Budapest. The expedition organised by the Hebrew University and headed by Dr Bodenheimer and his assistant, Dr Oscar Theodor, went to the desert of Sinai for the purpose of establishing scientifically the truth about this Biblical phenomenon. For fifty years it had

been presumed but not proved that manna is a honey-like liquid which exudes from punctures made by an insect in the stems and hardens into the crystalline substance described by the Israelites as “a small round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground.”

The name “manna” was supposed to have arisen from the question which (he Israelites who saw it and “wist not what it was” asked. “Man hu?” (“What is it?”)—“And the houses of Israel called the name thereof manna, and it was like a coriander seed, white, and the taste of it. was like wafers made with honey.” To this day manna is consumed by the roaming Bedouin and sold to pilgrims as “celestial manna.”

The two scientists did not know whether their problem was one of plant physiology or entomological research. They provided themselves with equipment that would help them to solve it in either case. As a result of his research Dr Bodenheimer convinced the world that manna is not a secretion of the tamarisk, but of the scale insects known to scientists as najococcus and trebutina. The secre-

tion, ranging in size from a pin-head to a pea, drops in the form of syrup, falls to the ground, and is crystallised. In appearance and taste it fits exactly the Biblical description, “like wafers made with honey.”