Omer

The omer is a dry measure used in the wilderness manna narrative. It functions both as the daily ration per person and as the standard against which the larger ephah is defined.

The Daily Ration

When manna first appears in the wilderness, Yahweh sets the omer as the per-head allotment: "This is the thing which Yahweh has commanded, Gather⁺ of it every man according to his eating; an omer a head, according to the number of your⁺ souls, you⁺ will take it, every man for those who are in his tent" (Ex 16:16). The portion is not a flat issue but indexed to household size — each tent receives an omer per soul.

The actual gathering does not produce uniform results, yet the omer absorbs the variance. "And the sons of Israel did so, and gathered some more, some less. And when they measured it with an omer, he who gathered much had nothing over, and he who gathered little had no lack; they gathered every man according to his eating" (Ex 16:17-18). The measurement produces sufficiency where the harvest produced disparity.

The Memorial Jar

The omer also defines the size of the memorial portion preserved for later generations. Moses commands, "This is the thing which Yahweh has commanded, Let a full omer of it be kept throughout your⁺ generations, that they may see the bread with which I fed you⁺ in the wilderness, when I brought you⁺ forth from the land of Egypt" (Ex 16:32). The same unit that fed a single person each day fixes the size of the witness preserved against the ration's future forgetting.

The Omer and the Ephah

The narrator closes the chapter with an explicit conversion: "Now an omer is the tenth part of an ephah" (Ex 16:36). The larger Hebrew dry measure is anchored to the wilderness ration, so the unit established in the manna narrative becomes the calibration for the ephah throughout the rest of scripture.