“And the children of Israel said unto them, Would to God we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we did eat bread to the full; for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”
The Israelites said to them: if only we had died by the Lord's hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death. The complaint inverts the Exodus: Egypt, which was slavery and death, is now remembered as abundance; the wilderness, which is freedom and divine accompaniment, is now experienced as starvation. The pots of meat are the idealized memory of people who have forgotten that the meat was eaten in bondage. The retrospective idealization of Egypt will recur throughout the wilderness narrative — in Numbers 11:5 the people will long for fish, cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic. Memory under pressure selects for comfort and edits out suffering. The complaint that God has brought them out to die is the deepest possible misreading of the Exodus, and God answers it not with rebuke but with bread.
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