Murmuring 2 - Exodus 16:1-8

16:1- 8- I was thinking about why I was so irritated by the “murmuring” comment the other day, and I had some thoughts. I imagined myself being in the wilderness there without food or water, and yeah it would have sucked and I probably would have mentioned it at some point, but what most likely happened was the kids, who have a lower tolerance for hunger and thirst, probably went to their mamas and cried that they were hungry, thirsty, and tired. This would have caused the mama bear to come out in a lot of women who would have probably turned to their husbands to be like “what the heck? Feed us.” The husbands would have gone next to Moses and “murmured” “where’s the food?”

There are some times when the example of true murmuring is given, like when they say “weren’t there enough graves back in Egypt that you had to bring us all out here to die?” or “we would rather be slaves in Egypt than starve out here in the desert!” Those are all statements that are not helpful nor are they more than just a statement of need. But not all the times that a concern is brought up are they phrased beyond anything more than ‘hey we’re hungry, what’s the plan?” It irritates me that basic statements of needs are brushed of as “complaining,” or the idea that bringing up your needs to the proper “authorities” demonstrates a lack of faith or unwillingness to follow the prophet. The vast majority of gospel teachings from God have come as the result of a question or a statement of need, from the very top (Joseph Smith praying to know which church was right) to my own personal revelations (when I’m just done and Jesus walks me through it).

When genuinely bringing up a question or concern, the answer, “follow the prophet” is not acceptable as a proper answer in all cases and seems to be very dismissive to me. It’s like in 2004 when the body armor of American troops was failing in Iraq resulting in massive casualties, and when the issue was brought up Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. Secretary of Defense answered their “murmuring” with “you go to war with the army you have not the army you want.” That’s just the way that I took the answers of “murmuring” to be “sorry your kids are hungry and thirsty but you should just follow the prophet more.” It just felt very belittling and dismissive and not the way that I think Jesus would have answered. Is that the answer that was correct? Maybe. Is that the way it should have been answered? I don’t think so. Anyway, just wanted to go into a little bit more about why I was so aggravated about that statement last time.

Now all that being said, expressing a concern that you don’t feel it being addressed properly is one thing but being a complaining douche bag is common and unnecessary, there are plenty of times when the Israelites do this, and after traveling in the wilderness some more, that’s exactly what happens. The people are hungry and tell Moses, basically, “it would have been better if God had killed us in Egypt because at least then we wouldn’t have been hungry.” That’s a little bit dramatic and unhelpful, I think. God tells Moses, “Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a certain rate every day, that I may prove them, whether they will walk in my law, or no.”

TB notes that the word “God” used here is the proper name for Israel’s God of YHWH meaning that he didn’t mean to say that “I God,” he meant to say “I myself, the God of you, the God of Moses, and the God of the people,” will do this thing. It goes back to the whole “if you know the proper name of a god, then you can use them to do work in your favor,” thing. God’s saying, “you can know my name, it’s fine.” He’s also saying, “I am the one who did all this, not Moses” because the people still don’t really believe that it isn’t Moses doing all these miracles. And it makes sense, the people don’t know a lot about the God of their fathers, they were surrounded for hundreds of years by a culture that had varied and powerful gods. This is what they knew and they were just now being introduced to the new God. It’s not just that the God is new, but all the rules they believed about gods were new. Other gods didn’t travel with their people, but this one did. Other gods weren’t telling their followers their names, but this one does.

The fact that the people believe that Moses is the one doing all this is further demonstrated in verses 7 and 8 because Moses tells the people that when God provides the bread in the mornings and the meat in the evenings, they will know that it is God doing these things, therefore when they complain, they are not complaining about Moses and Aaron, but are instead complaining directly against God. TB notes, “Moses was the visible human presence, and so Moses caught all the grief. Therefore, as it say so clearly in this verse, part of the lesson from the Manna was to teach Israel that it was Yehovah, and not Moses, who rescued Israel from Egypt. This is a lesson that Israel will not fully grasp for decades.”