Exodus 16:31-36

"And the house of Israel called the name thereof Manna: and it was like coriander seed, white; and the taste thereof was like wafers made with honey. And Moses said, This is the thing which Jehovah hath commanded, Let an omer-ful of it be kept throughout your generations, that they may see the bread wherewith I fed you in the wilderness, when I brought you forth from the land of Egypt. And Moses said unto Aaron, Take a pot, and put an omer-ful of manna therein, and lay it up before Jehovah, to be kept throughout your generations. As Jehovah commanded Moses, so Aaron laid it up before the Testimony, to be kept. And the children of Israel did eat the manna forty years, until they came to a land inhabited; they did eat the manna, until they came into the borders of the land of Canaan. Now an omer is the tenth part of an ephah."

It is a gross error to date this paragraph late because it "implies the Ark and the Tabernacle."[30] To be sure, these were not yet given to Israel, but Moses, writing near the end of the forty-year wilderness experience, included right here in the narrative where it belongs the things that God did later to memorialize the manna. It is impossible to construe any sacred writing as a chronological account of everything mentioned. Anyone familiar with the gospels is aware that many things are recorded out of sequence chronologically. As Dobson explained it:

"The writer of Exodus is not saying that the manna was put in the Ark of the Covenant in the wilderness of Sin. He is describing here something that was done later on, because it has to do with the manna, which is the subject of the story. Students of the Gospels will know that the Gospel writers also sometimes arranged what they wanted to write according to subject, and not always according to the time when it happened."[31]

Who can fail to be amused at Dummelow's "contradiction," based on the fact that, "The pot of manna was said to be deposited before the Testimony (the tables of the Decalogue), but in Hebrews 9:4 it is said to have been in the Ark."[32] For the benefit of all such nit-pickers, both the tables of the Law and the pot of manna were in the Ark!"

It is also a matter of great importance to some commentators that the mention of the children of Israel and their coming into the borders of Canaan, and the continuation of the manna until that time is boldly ascribed to some later writer. Such a deduction of course is founded upon the rather naive conclusion that the Servant of God who so magnificently prophesied the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ was incapable of prophesying such a thing as the cessation of the manna when Israel came into Canaan. We do not believe that a deduction of that kind is intelligent. Nevertheless, if God needed another, and a later writer, to include these details in the narrative, he might very well have used Joshua or Ezra, both of whom were inspired and who could easily have done so. As Fields stated it:

Exodus 16:35 sounds as if it were written after the manna had ceased to be provided. If so, this one verse was inserted by Joshua, or some other writer after Moses' death. This probability no more casts doubt on the Mosaic authorship of Exodus, than does the insertion of the facts about Moses' death casts doubt on the Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy.[33]

We should remember, as one of the wisest men of a whole millennium stated it, that, "Joshua wrote some things in the Law of God (the Pentateuch) (Joshua 24:26) ... these were public books and therefore not written without the authority of Moses."[34]