Exodus 16:16 - On the noun אִישׁ

(The above rendering comes from the RJPS translation, an adaptation of the NJPS translation. Before accounting for this rendering, I will analyze the plain sense of the Hebrew term אִישׁ, by employing a situation-oriented construal as outlined in this introduction, pp. 11–16.)
Here the situating noun אִישׁ labels the party responsible for the “gathering” (plural verb from the root לקט) and the “fetching” (plural verb from the root לקח). The two clauses employ classic distributive constructions, in which a phrase headed by the bare noun אִישׁ describes the manner of action schematically.

At issue is the unit of distribution of the depicted action. Is it the individual gatherer, or the household?

Construing the phrases as referring to the individual gatherer contradicts two conditions laid out in the same verse. If that individual gathers as much as that person eats (per the first clause), this conflicts with:

The result is an incoherent text—and thus confusing or confused instructions.

R. Ḥayyim ben Moses ibn Attar proposed a resolution in his commentary Or ha-Ḥayyim (1742): “the consumption of all the household’s members is considered to be the consumption of the individual gatherer upon whom it depends.” I.e., we should read the phrase metonymically, in which the gatherer (the אִישׁ who is the head of the household) stands for that household. However, there is a linguistically more natural solution.

The solution comes from noticing that where the identical phrase occurred a few chapters earlier, אִישׁ clearly refers to households, for this fact was made explicit earlier in the verse:

Happily, applying that same construal here in 16:16 yields an informative and coherent text. Furthermore, cognitively speaking, such a construal is highly available: in ancient Israel, it would have gone without saying that a household is the constituent unit of the Israelite polity—which is the group in question, as identified in the previous verse. As J. David Schloen has emphasized, throughout the ancient Near East “the ‘household’ … provides the template for social interaction at all levels” (The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East [2001], p. 70). In other words, for the ancient audience of this verse, the concept of the household would have come immediately to mind. Consequently, this situation-oriented construal must be the passage’s plain sense.

The reader may be surprised that singular אִישׁ can regard a group of people as a unit. Yet Biblical Hebrew similarly applies singular אִישׁ to households also in Num 1:52, 2:2, 34; 1 Kgs 5:5. And it occasionally applies this noun likewise to other groups of persons:
• clans or lineages (Num 26:54, 35:8)
• tribes (Num 36:9)
• nations (Gen 10:5b; Zeph 2:11).
In each case, אִישׁ refers to whatever unit best defines the situation under discussion, as a matter of salience.

Although the concept expressed by אִישׁ arose in the ontological domain of human beings, the extension of אִישׁ to non-human and/or abstract referents is cognitively natural if the speaker’s focus is on this noun’s main function, namely, to situate a referent efficiently during communication about a situation. And that is so when speaking about the manner of action that the verb is describing—as is the case in all of the cited instances—because then the referent of אִישׁ is necessarily nonspecific: it exists only in the discourse, rather than in the real world.