According to the Book of Exodus, manna, the food miraculously provided for the Israelites after they left Egypt, takes its name from the question the Israelites asked each other when they discovered it upon the ground: “Man hu?”—which, translated from Aramaic, means something like “What is this?” However, the Arabic word mann—the name of a sweet, edible sap exuded by the tamarisk plant—may also be the source of the Hebrew man, which is what manna was originally called in the early Greek and Latin versions of the Bible (the Hebrew man is, of course, no relation to the English word that means male adult). In its present form, as manna, the word first appeared at the end of the ninth century when Alfred, King of the West Saxons, translated a Latin work by Pope Gregory into Old English.
Dried sap from the flowering ash tree.
The sweet juice obtained from the flowering ash, Fraxinus ornus.