At Rephidim the people thirsted and quarrelled with Moses: 'Give us water to drink.' Moses cried to the LORD: 'What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.' The LORD said: 'Pass on before the people, taking with you some of the elders of Israel; take in your hand the rod with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will stand before you there on the rock at Horeb; you shall strike the rock, and water shall come out of it, that the people may drink.'
Moses did so in the sight of the elders. Water gushed out abundantly. He called the name of the place Massah (testing) and Meribah (contention), because of the quarrelling and because they had tested the LORD. St. Paul reads the episode as a typology: 'They drank from the spiritual Rock which followed them, and the Rock was Christ' (1 Cor 10:4). A second water-from-rock episode (Numbers 20) at Meribah-Kadesh would later be the occasion of Moses's exclusion from the Promised Land — his anger having broken the symbolism of the type.