Emily Dickinson Lexicon

MAN'NA, n. [Ar. مَانَ mauna, to provide necessaries for one's household, to sustain, to feed them; مُونَهٌ munahon, provisions for a journey. This seems to be the true original of the word. In Irish, mann is wheat, bread or food. Class Mn, No. 3.]

1. A substance miraculously furnished, as food for the Israelites in their journey through the wilderness of Arabia. Ex. xvi. Josephus, Ant. B. iii. 1, considers the Hebrew word מן man, to signify what. In conformity with this idea, the Seventy translate the passage, Ex. xvi. 15, τι εστι τουτο what is this? which rendering seems to accord with the following words, "for they knew not what it was." And in the Encyclopedia, the translators are charged with making Moses fall into a plain contradiction. Art. Manna. But Christ and his apostles confirm the common version: "Not as your fathers ate manna, and are dead." John vi. 58. Heb. ix. 4. And we have other evidence, that the present version is correct; for in the same chapter, Moses directed Aaron to “take a pot and put a homer full of manna therein.” Now it would be strange language to say, put an homer full of what, or what is it. So also verse 35: “The children of Israel ate manna forty years,” &c. In both verses, the Hebrew word is the some as in verse 15.
2. In the materia medica, the juice of a certain tree of the ash kind, the Fraxinus ornus, or flowering ash, a native of Sicily, Calabria, and other parts of the south of Europe. It is either naturally concreted, or exsiccated and purified by art. The best manna is in oblong pieces or flakes of a whitish or pale yellow color, light, friable, and somewhat transparent. It is a mild laxative. Encyc. Hooper.