There was nothing in the ark except the two tablets that Moses put there at Horeb, where the LORD made a covenant with the people of Israel, when they came out of Egypt (2 Chronicles 5:10).
When Solomon finally brought the ark of the covenant to the finished temple in Jerusalem, only the tablets of the law remained inside. Hebrews 9:4 tells us that originally the ark contained three items: Aaron’s staff, heavenly manna, and the two tablets. However, in the roughly 500 years that had elapsed since the building of the ark, Aaron’s staff and the memorial portion of manna had long since rotted into dust. I contend that it is this passage from 2 Chronicles (and its sister passage 1 Kings 8:9) that inspired Isaiah to give us one of the most memorable epigrams on the enduring nature of God’s word: “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever” (Is. 40:8). If the ark of the Covenant yet exists on this earth, and the tablets are still in it, then you could see there the unique handiwork of God, his words of the Covenant inscribed in stone. Undiminished, still legible, eternal, immutable.
Prophecy is often expressed as divine poetry, so it should not be surprising that Isaiah’s reference to the ark’s ⅔ emptiness is presented somewhat elliptically. The poetic allusion works as follows:
- Isaiah refers to Aaron’s staff as “the flower” because it was by means of budding that Aaron’s staff was selected from among all the competing leaders of Israel (Numbers 17);
- the Word of the Lord is not characterized by any concrete referent. However, by accentuating the “foreverness” or eternality of God’s word, it is a very natural poetic link to the eternality of the stone upon which the ten words were written. Isaiah himself uses this trope in 26:4 “Trust in the LORD forever, for the LORD GOD is an everlasting rock.”
- Isaiah’s reference to the manna as “grass” is the least obvious poetic referent. Arguments for the link can be made through two related methods. The first method involves poetic association between the images of “dew” and “grass” throughout the corpus of Scripture. Numbers 11:9 explains “When the dew fell upon the camp in the night, the manna fell with it.” If I were to ask any person to complete the phrase “morning dew on the _____” the number one response would be “grass.” Despite the fact that there may not have been much grass in the various places the Israelites received their dole of heavenly dew (e.g., the wilderness), the connection between grass and dew is fully proverbial in Scripture. Examples can be found in Deuteronomy 32:2; Psalm 72:6; Proverbs 19:12; Daniel 4:15, 23–25.1 These verses are included in the footnote, along with the different words used for “grass” in conjunction with dew. The second method of demonstrating a link between manna and grass is less dependent on poetic association. This approach relies on the simple fact that the word translated as “grass” in Isaiah 40:8 (Strong’s 2682, “hatsir”) can denote any small green plant and is elsewhere translated as “leek” or “herb”. This then could be a word-picture link with the “coriander seed” to which manna is compared in Numbers 11:7. Coriander is another name for cilantro [Coriandrum sativum] and falls within the lexical flexibility of “hatsir” used in Isaiah 40:8. So, in this approach, the manna is said to resemble “grass.”
The two preceding methods for linking “grass” and manna are not mutually exclusive. Taken together, each could be described as examples of poetic, metonymy2 and may function together through a two-step synecdochal3 replacement. The argument to be made for Isaiah’s use of this poetic structure is rather abstruse and is itself relegated to yet another footnote.4
To review and summarize: Isaiah’s reflection that “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever” (40:8) is a poetic reflection upon the historical fact recorded in 2 Chronicles 5:10 and 1 Kings 8:9 that by Solomon’s time, only the tablets remained in the ark of the covenant. In restating the ⅔ emptiness of the ark, he takes a small narrative detail and broadens it out as an interpretive key to unlock the significance of the vanishing of the other two articles in the ark. The tablets representing God’s Word were always the fountainhead from which the other two miracles flowed. Aaron’s role as high priest, announced by the budding of his staff, was also a result of God’s eternal declarative word. The bread from heaven similarly came from his decree. However, these specific manifestations of God’s eternal word were intentionally short-lived, whereas his word is eternal. The line of Melchizedek was always waiting in the wings to replace Aaron’s staff with a rod of iron. The bread from the skies was always defined by the fact that it spoiled within 24 hours. This aspect of the manna was a constant reminder of its ephemerality. The miracles of the staff and manna were effective for a time, before fading away. However, the tablets were included as a sign that there were certain elements of the Covenant, God’s Word, that would never change. Thus Jesus assured us that “until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished” and likewise, Isaiah encourages us to “Trust in the LORD forever, for the LORD GOD is an everlasting rock” (26:4).
Other Biblical Occurrences of the Three Covenant Symbols
To strengthen the claim that Isaiah is referencing the elements in the ark, we can look at how other biblical authors use the imagery of staff, bread, and stone.
Three passages in Ezekiel similarly reprise a poetic broadening of the three images of staff, bread, and stone. Ezekiel 4:16; 5:16; and 14:135 all present a context in which God’s words (commandments/tablets) have been transgressed. As a result, Yahweh vows to break Israel’s “staff of bread.” The staff (good governance) and bread (physical provision) are both covenantal conditions that obtain only if the first, eternal portion of the covenant is observed, the commandments. If God’s eternally graven words are disregarded, God will take away the staff and the bread. The bundling together of the two terms into a single phrase, “staff of bread,” is very interesting, seeming almost to indicate that they can function as a single conceptual unit.
A New Testament passage that presents us with all three symbols is the letter to Pergamum in Revelation 2:12–17. First we see the “rod” (or staff) presented as a “sword” in v. 12 “The words of him who has the sharp two-edged sword” and v.16 “I will come to you soon and war against them with the sword of my mouth.“ This is not a bait and switch. In Revelation 19:15, we see John the Revelator give his own gloss on Psalm 2, melding the images of sword and rod as nearly interchangeable: “From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty” (Rev. 2:15). The sword is an intensification of the image of the rod; a “glorified” rod, if you will. Scripture frequently melds or intensifies images in this way (serpent to dragon, stone to mountain, stump or seed to tree) and that is what we have happening here in Revelation 2:15.
After the second mention of the staff/sword in v.16, we have a reference to the bread of the covenant: “To the one who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except the one who receives it’” (2:17). Whereas Ezekiel melded the images of the staff and the bread, John seems to pair the bread and the stone through parallelism; either they are two separate rewards for the conqueror, or they are two descriptions of the same gift. There are plenty of passages that should leap to mind as we contemplate the relationship between God’s word, stone, and bread: “if your children ask for a loaf of bread, do you give them a stone?” (Matthew 7:9); “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread” (4:3); “But he answered, ‘It is written, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” (4:4); and “I have treasured the words of his mouth more than my portion [of bread]” (Job 23:12). If there is a sliding scale of intensity between the rod and sword, then possibly bread and stone as images exist on a similar spectrum.
One explanation for the tendency of the three elements to endlessly mix and blur is the progressive nature of how God’s Word is given. When God first gave the law, it was written on tablets of stone, a metaphor for the Israelites’ hearts (Proverbs 7:3). But the Lord promises in Ezekiel:
I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules (36:26–27).
He gives them a heart of flesh and then the ability to follow his laws, transposing the words of God from the stone tablets into their new hearts of flesh. Just like the ultimate form of the rod is the sword, the ultimate form of the bread is flesh:
I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.
(John 6:48–59; emphasis mine).6
The Word come down from heaven was always something that man was intended to “ingest.” Scrolls are eaten in Ezekiel 3:3; Jeremiah 15:16; Revelation 10:9–10. In the Ezekiel and Revelation passages, the flavor is described as “sweet like honey,” much in the same way Exodus 16:31 describes the manna as tasting “like wafers made with honey.” While the manna was an ephemeral gift, the source of that miracle, the commands of God, were intended to be made eternal through the living stones of the people of Israel as they ingested his words and did the deeds of righteousness he required.
If it hasn’t become clear already– the rod and the bread are both products of the rock. The eternal, adamantine word of God IS the source of provision and good government: the staff of life (bread) and the rod of rule (sword). Without the Word, the other two do not exist. Where God’s word remains, the other two can always spring anew. This is something that Americans should keep in mind as we seek to refresh our government. Little lasting headway will be made without acknowledging God’s law-word as the source of all legitimate governance.
Christ as the Word and the Rock
All Scripture finds its fulfilment in Christ, so it should not be surprising that Isaiah’s epigram about the supremacy of God’s Word over the other symbols in the ark finds its grandest fulfilment in Christ. Christ IS the Word of God, and from his mouth come both the true bread from heaven and the two edged sword/rod of iron. The unity of all three symbols in the person of Christ explains the confusion of the images. This is the true message of 2 Chronicles 5:10 when the ark was opened. The manna and the rod had rotted away into dust, leaving only the eternal word. Just as we must die in this body of death, returning to dust (1 Corinthians 15:42–49), so the bread and rod are reborn in the person of Christ, the word incarnate. The perishable, having returned to the dust, is raised in glory, putting on the imperishable. In this glorified state, all of the elements find their unity in Christ and are all partaken of by his Bride. As Christ’s flesh and the rod of his word, they are now part of God’s graven word. This explains how the stone tablets that contained the letter that kills are transformed into white stones that contain God’s life-giving name to us (Revelation 2:17). The old tablets of the law spoke to us about what was to be done; the white stones speak about us, defining the risen reality of our new identity in Christ.
“The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.” However, the passing away of the grass and the flower are not true tragedies because God “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Romans 4:17). In him we live and breathe and have our being, and if he should set his heart to it and gather to himself his spirit and his breath, all flesh would perish together, and man would return to dust (Job 34:14–15). The High Priestly role of Aaron was good and fitting for its time, but it was not eternal. The provision of manna in the wilderness was a glorious grace, but it had to end. Until Jesus sat down at the right hand of the Father, all specific means of grace were temporary. Even the elements contained in the Ark of the Covenant were passing away. But not God’s Word, the fullness of which fills all in all.
Jonathan David White is a 2021-22 Theopolis Fellow. He lives in Annapolis, MD with his wife and two sons.
NOTES
- While it would possibly strengthen the argument if the same word were used for “grass” everywhere the idiomatic “dew on the grass” is found in scripture, I do think that a conceptual, rather than a lexical connection is sufficient to indicate Isaiah’s intention to reference the manna. The examples that I have included in no way exhaust the dew/grass connection in the OT, but give a sampling of the ways in which it is used and the different Hebrew words for “grass” in this connection:
“The grass [2682. חָצִיר (chatsir)] withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.” Isaiah 40:8
“May my teaching drop as the rain, my speech distill as the dew, like gentle rain upon the tender grass [ 1877 deshe דֶּשֶׁא], and like showers upon the herb [6212 eseb עֶשֶׂב].” Deuteronomy 32:2
“May he be like rain that falls on the mown grass [1488 gez גֵּז ],
like showers that water the earth!” Psalm 72:6
“A king’s wrath is like the growling of a lion, but his favor is like dew on the grass [6212 eseb עֶשֶׂב].” Proverbs 19:12
“But leave the stump of its roots in the earth, bound with a band of iron and bronze, amid the tender grass of the field. Let him be wet with the dew of heaven. Let his portion be with the beasts in the grass [1883. דִּתְאָא (dethe)] of the earth.” Daniel 4:15 ↩︎ - Metonymy is a figure of speech in which a concept is referred to by the name of something closely associated with that thing or concept. ↩︎
- Synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa ↩︎
- A simple example from modern English usage would be: “I wasn’t hungry until I saw my dinner plate piled high.” While no explicit mention of food is made in that sentence, the dinner plate is the representative piece used to stand in for the culinary whole of baked potato, rare steak, and mac’n’cheese heaped high on the dish. In the same way the plate that holds the food is used to stand in for the meal, so might Isaiah be using the grass to stand in for the manna that fell with the dew on the grass. While Isaiah does not explicitly mention any part of the dew’s physical properties he references the intrinsic context of the manna’s coming with the morning dew (i.e. glistening on the grass or small green plants of the field). Biblical examples of metonymy and synecdoche follow:
Metonymy: “My mouth is filled with your praise” (Ps. 71:8a)– The mouth is only the bodily organ expressing the praise that the Psalmist feels. However, poetically concretizing the phrase strengthens his image.
Synechdoche: “The wise heart will receive commandments, but a babbling fool will come to ruin.” (Prov. 10:8)– Here, the “wise heart” stands in for the entire “wise man,” contrasting with the “babbling fool” ↩︎ - In each of the following passages, what the ESV translates as “break the supply of bread,” the Hebrew is literally to break the “staff” [4294. Matteh מַטֶּה ] of bread [3899. Lechem לֶחֶם ]
“Moreover, he said to me, “Son of man, behold, I will break the supply of bread in Jerusalem. They shall eat bread by weight and with anxiety, and they shall drink water by measure and in dismay.” (Ez. 4:16)
“when I send against you the deadly arrows of famine, arrows for destruction, which I will send to destroy you, and when I bring more and more famine upon you and break your supply of bread.” (Ez. 5:16)
“Son of man, when a land sins against me by acting faithlessly, and I stretch out my hand against it and break its supply of bread and send famine upon it, and cut off from it man and beast,” (Ez. 14:13) ↩︎ - Far be it from a Theopolitan to respect the tyranny of context, but I do have to acknowledge that Isaiah 40:6 explicitly states “All flesh is grass,” which gives us a direct link from flesh to the manna as that which descends with the dew and resembles cilantro seed ↩︎