WORTHLESS, of no weight — the people’s word for the manna at Numbers 21:5, and the only occurrence of this form in the Hebrew Bible. Its root family (qalal, to be light) runs from physical lightness to triviality to contempt, and relatives of it describe crooked paths (Judges 5:6), mountains reeling (Jeremiah 4:24) and a blunt axe-head (Ecclesiastes 10:10). ⚠ The King James’s ‘this LIGHT bread’ — shared by Geneva and the Douay — is not an error but a four-hundred-year-old English sense: ‘light’ once meant trifling, which is exactly the Hebrew’s range. A modern reader takes it as a comment on the loaf, which is why this translation says ‘worthless’ instead and leaves the older reading here. → first discussed at Num 21:5