RAINING OF MANNA AND QUAIL




He gave them Quail the night before He rained down Manna for the first time. 

Exodus. 16. 11-16 
The LORD said to Moses, 

"I have heard the grumbling of the Israelites. Tell them, 'At twilight you will eat meat, and in the morning you will be filled with bread. Then you will know that I am the LORD your God.' " 

That evening quail came and covered the camp, and in the morning there was a layer of dew around the camp. 

When the dew was gone, thin flakes like frost on the ground appeared on the desert floor. 

When the Israelites saw it, they said to each other, "What is it?" For they did not know what it was. 
Moses said to them, "It is the bread the LORD has given you to eat. 

This is what the LORD has commanded: 'Each one is to gather as much as he needs. Take an omer for each person you have in your tent.' " 

......................................... 

The second time was when after awhile they got tired of eating Manna and started complaining again. 

Numbers 11.4-6,31-34 
The rabble with them began to crave other food, and again the Israelites started wailing and said, "If only we had meat to eat! 

We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost—also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic. 

But now we have lost our appetite; we never see anything but this manna!" 

Now a wind went out from the LORD and drove quail in from the sea. It brought them down all around the camp to about three feet above the ground, as far as a day's walk in any direction. 

All that day and night and all the next day the people went out and gathered quail. No one gathered less than ten homers. Then they spread them out all around the camp. 

But while the meat was still between their teeth and before it could be consumed, the anger of the LORD burned against the people, and he struck them with a severe plague. 

Therefore the place was named Kibroth Hattaavah, because there they buried the people who had craved other food. 

Raining animals is a rare meteorological phenomenon in which flightless animals "rain" from the sky. Such occurrences have been reported in many countries throughout history. One hypothesis offered to explain this phenomenon is that tornadic waterspoutssometimes pick up creatures such as fish or frogs, and carry them for up to several miles. However, this primary aspect of the phenomenon (pick up) has never been witnessed by scientists.

Rain of flightless creatures and objects has been reported throughout history. In the first century AD, Roman naturalist Pliny The Elder documented storms of frogs and fish. In 1794, French soldiers witnessed toads fall from the sky during heavy rain at Lalain, near the French city ofLille. In 1857, people from Lake County in California reported fall of sugar crystals from the sky.Rural habitants in Yoro, Honduras, claim 'fish rain' happens there every summer, a phenomenon they call Lluvia de Peces.In March 2010, spangled perch fell out of the sky over a remote desert town in the Australian outback.

Explanationsg 
Tornadoes may lift up animals into the air and deposit them miles away.

French physicist André-Marie Ampère (1775 – 1836) was among the first scientists to take seriously accounts of raining animals. Speaking in front of the Society of Natural Sciences, Ampère suggested that at times frogs and toads roam the countryside in large numbers, and that the action of violent winds can pick them up and carry them great distances. Sometimes the animals survive the fall, suggesting the animals are dropped shortly after extraction. Several witnesses of raining frogs describe the animals as startled, though healthy, and exhibiting relatively normal behavior shortly after the event. In some incidents, the animals are frozen to death or even completely encased in ice. There are examples where the product of the rain is not intact animals, but shredded body parts. Some cases occur just after storms having strong winds, especially during tornadoes.However, there have been many unconfirmed cases in which rainfalls of animals have occurred in fair weather and in the absence of strong winds or waterspouts.

Given that waterspouts do not actually lift anything (the water droplets visible in the column are merely condensation), it lacks plausibility to suggest that they are capable of lifting fish from below the surface of the water and high into the sky.

A better accepted scientific explanation involves tornadic waterspouts: a tornado that forms over land and travels over the water. Under this hypothesis, a tornadic waterspout transports animals to relatively high altitudes, carrying them over large distances. This hypothesis appears supported by the type of animals in these rains: small and light, usually aquatic,and by the suggestion that the rain of animals is often preceded by a storm. However, the theory does not account for how all the animals involved in each individual incident would be from only one species, and not a group of similarly-sized animals from a single area.
Doppler Image from Texas showing the collision of a thunderstorm with a group of bats in flight. The color red indicates the animals flying into the storm.

In the case of birds, storms may overcome a flock in flight, especially in times of migration. The image to the right shows an example wherein a group of bats is overtaken by a thunderstorm. In the image, the bats are in the red zone, which corresponds to winds moving away from the radar station, and enter into a mesocyclone associated with a tornado (in green). These events may occur easily with birds, which can get killed in flight, or stunned and then fall (unlike flightless creatures, which first have to be lifted into the air by an outside force). Sometimes this happens in large groups, for instance, theblackbirds falling from the sky in Beebe, Arkansas, United States on December 31, 2010. It is common for birds to become disoriented (for example, because of bad weather or fireworks) and collide with objects such as trees or buildings, killing them or stunning them into falling to their death. The number of blackbirds killed in Beebe is not spectacular considering the size of their congregations, which can be in the millions. The event in Beebe, however, captured the imagination and led to more reports in the media of birds falling from the sky across the globe, such as in Sweden and Italy, though many scientists claim such mass deaths are common occurrences but usually go unnoticed. In contrast, it is harder to find a plausible explanation for rains of terrestrial animals.

At times scientists have easily dismissed extraordinary claims of raining fish. For example, in the case of a reported rain of fish in Singapore in 1861, French naturalist Francis de Laporte de Castelnau explained that the supposed rain took place during a migration of walking catfish, which are capable of dragging themselves over the land from one puddle to another. Thus, he argued that the appearance of fish on the ground immediately after a rain was easily explained, as these animals usually move over soft ground or after a rain.

Comments

Popular Posts