The Israelites left Elim, and continued their journey toward the promised land. After 2 and a half months of wandering aimlessly, they arrived at the wilderness of Sin, which one would have to take as something of a bad omen.

There, they began to bitch and moan again about how Moses and Aaron had gotten them all lost and how hungry they were.

"What's the big idea," the Israelites said to Moses and Aaron, "of bringing us out here to starve to death? We would have rather been killed by all those plagues in Egypt…at least then we would have died with full stomachs. You guys suck."

So Moses and Aaron went to God to tell him to get the Israelites to stop picking on them. God told Moses that he would rain bread on everyone so they would have enough to eat. They could gather the bread every day, except for the Sabbath, and then they would know God hadn’t abandoned them. Armed with this information, they could feel free to shut the hell up and do what they were told instead of complaining all the time.

So Moses and Aaron went before the people and told them the good news: God would show them he was real and that they were really lucky he had brought them out of Egypt instead of leaving them there to be smothered to death by frogs. He would do this by providing them with meat that very evening and providing them with bread the next morning. So, Moses said, please stop picking on us because it hurts our feelings. And after all, it's really God you're mad at, not us.

And Moses told Aaron to tell the entire congregation pretty much what he had just told them. While Aaron was putting everyone to sleep repeating the same stuff, God appeared in a cloud and spoke to Moses, saying: "Go tell the people that I've heard their incessant complaining, and they'll have meat to eat this evening and bread to eat in the morning." Moses considered telling God that he had just finished telling the people exactly that, and in fact Aaron was telling them that same thing again at that very moment, but thought better of it.

That evening, a mass of quails came into the camp, and the Israelites got to eat some tasty quail meat. In the morning, the ground was thick with dew. As the dew evaporated, the ground was covered in tiny little edible things about the size of small seeds. When the people saw this, they called it "manna", primarily because they didn't know what it was and didn't know what else to call it (seriously). Moses, seeing a bunch of strange seed-like things on the ground that looked vaguely edible, told everyone that this stuff was the bread God had promised them. He instructed them all to go out and gather one omer (an ancient unit of measure) of manna for each person in their tents.

So, everyone went out and gathered all the manna they could carry, some more and some less. However, no matter how hard or fast people worked to gather the stuff, when it was measured out, they all turned out to have gathered precisely one omer per person in their tents. So, the people that busted ass had nothing extra, and the people who spent most of the day lying around making "manna angels" got the same as everyone else. Kind of a rip-off for the hard workers, but that's life for you.

Moses instructed each person to eat all of the manna they had gathered, and not attempt to store any. Despite this warning, some people decided to store it anyway, not wanting to go through the whole starvation thing again. Unfortunately, all of the manna they tried to store ended up going rancid and got worms all over it. Moses, seeing the manna worms, got righteously pissed off with these people and, one assumes, they eventually stopped trying to store the stuff.

And so it was that every man gathered all the manna he needed, and whatever was left over on the ground melted when the sun got really hot toward the middle of the day. On the sixth day, everyone gathered twice as much manna as normal so they wouldn't have to gather any on the Sabbath. Because God really hates people doing anything on his special day, he made it so that the manna stored for the Sabbath wouldn't go bad or attract any of those icky worms.

On the Sabbath, Moses reminded everyone to eat the manna they had stored from the day before, and not to go out and gather any more. Despite this, some people decided to go out and gather more anyway, but found that there was none on the ground. God, seeing these people out and about on the Sabbath, gave Moses a good talking to:

"Moses," he said, "Do these people break my commandments all the time as a hobby, or are they thinking of going pro? I've told you a thousand times that no one is allowed to work on the Sabbath. The Sabbath is my bath day, and the last thing I need is for some scofflaw Israelite wandering around and seeing my divine dangly bits. Keep them in their tents or else."

Sufficiently cowed, Moses reiterated to everyone else that they really, really needed to stop screwing around on the Sabbath and just stay inside.

And so the Israelites ate the manna every day. The manna was similar to white coriander seed, and tasted like crackers made with honey. And Moses told Aaron to gather an omer of manna and keep it in a pot for posterity, so that people could see the stuff that God had given the Israelites to live on while they wandered around the desert.

The Israelites wandered around the desert for forty years, eating manna until they were sick to death of it, and cursing the ridiculously inaccurate directions they had printed out from Google Maps before they left. Eventually, they came upon a land that actually had some other people in it, which was the land of Canaan.

Also, for anyone who was wondering how much an omer is: An omer is one tenth of an ephah. So now you know.