Good News Translation reverses these two verses, so that they are in chronological order, which other languages may find helpful.
The people went about and gathered it: Each morning after the manna fell on the ground during the night, the Israelites picked it up to prepare it for eating.
And ground it in mills or beat it in mortars: A mill was two flat stones between which grain was ground into flour by scraping the top stone against the bottom one. A mortar was a bowl-shaped receptacle made of wood in which grain was beat into flour by using a pestle. In this case they ground and beat the manna. Some languages will have rather close local equivalents for mills and mortars, but other languages may need to use descriptive phrases, for example, “stones for grinding grain” and “bowls for beating grain.”
And boiled it in pots, and made cakes of it: After the manna was made into flour, they boiled it or baked it into a type of bread. Cooking pots were deep containers made of metal or fired earthenware. The Hebrew word for cakes refers to flat, round loaves baked on a hot stone or on hot coals. Perhaps they were like scones, but certainly they were not “thin wafers” (Contemporary English Version). Translators should avoid the impression of light, sweet dessert-type cakes since these loaves contained no sugar. TNIV says “loaves.”
And the taste of it was like the taste of cakes baked with oil: The Hebrew construction here is rather awkward, which is reproduced in Revised Standard Version. In any case, the bread made out of manna tasted like normal bread baked with olive oil. Exo 16.31 says it tasted like bread made with honey. The Hebrew word for cakes differs from the one used in the previous sentence, but it has the same meaning. Oil refers to “olive oil” (Good News Translation).
When the dew fell upon the camp in the night, the manna fell with it: The translation here should not imply that the manna was all wet with dew when it came down or when it was gathered. The text is simply describing the time (early morning) and the manner (spread out over the ground) in which the manna would appear every day.
Quoted with permission from de Regt, Lénart J. and Wendland, Ernst R. A Handbook on Numbers. (UBS Helps for Translators). Miami: UBS, 2016. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .