“And Moses said, This shall be, when the Lord shall give you in the evening flesh to eat, and in the morning bread to the full; for that the Lord heareth your murmurings which ye murmur against him: and what are we? your murmurings are not against us, but against the Lord.”
Moses also said: you will know it was the Lord when he gives you meat to eat in the evening and all the bread you want in the morning, because he has heard your grumbling against him. You are not grumbling against us, but against the Lord. The restatement of verses 6–7 in slightly different form reinforces both points: the provision is God's act and the grumbling is against God, not Moses. Paul makes the same move in 1 Thessalonians 4:8 when he says whoever rejects this instruction does not reject a human being but God. The leader who deflects complaint from themselves to God is practicing the same pastoral theology Moses models here. The complaint about food is a complaint about God's governance of Israel's provision. The answer to that complaint is not argumentation but quail in the evening and manna in the morning.
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