A month out of Egypt the food runs out, and the people say plainly they would rather have died in Egypt with full stomachs. What arrives is quails in the evening — a documented Sinai migration, harvested there since the Old Kingdom — and in the morning something nobody recognizes. They name it by asking about it: man hu, what is it. The chapter is also where the noun sabbath appears for the first time in the Bible, four chapters before the commandment, taught not as law but as a fact about when food falls and when it doesn't.