YISRAEL COMES OUT OF EGYPT
YAHWEH Saves Yisrael From The Terror At The Red Sea
A fresh drama; Terror rang out from the tents (Shemoth 14:14)
But once again drama intervened. The Scripture records that Pharaoh began to repent of the hasty, liberation of his labour-force. ‘What have we done,’ his courtiers asked, ‘allowing Yisrael to leave our service?’ Straightaway the chariots were harnessed -these were war-machines with two fast horses each -and the fugitives pursued.
When the Hebrew camp saw this ‘armoured division’ coming upon them at the gallop, they at once sounded the alarm. Terror rang out from the tents. As soon as events looked ugly, the Yisraelites turned to Mosheh with insults and cursing: ‘Were there no graves in Egypt that you must lead us out to die in the wilderness?’ Their voices continued, full of hate and threatening: ‘What good have you done us, bringing us out of Egypt? Leave us alone. We would rather work for the Egyptians. Better to work for them than die in the wilderness !’
Mosheh answered the rioters: ‘YAHWEH will do the fighting for you.’
The miraculous crossing of the Red Sea; YAHWEH rescued Yisrael
But how, in fact, was this multitude, practically unarmed and essentially vulnerable, to be saved from the attack of these armoured chariots? Hope seemed gone, and the Exodus looked like being a catastrophe from the start.
The famous miracle then occurred: the Sea of Reeds was crossed dryshod. This is the traditional account of its main features: Mosheh stretched out his hand over the sea. YAHWEH drove back the sea with a strong easterly wind all night and he made dry land of the sea. The waters parted and the sons of Yisrael went on dry ground right into the sea, walls of water to right and to left of them. Soon, the column of emigrants had wholly passed over to the Asiatic bank. Then, in the morning watch (between two and six o’clock in the morning), the Egyptians decided to attack the Hebrews. Thereupon, Mosheh again stretched out his hand; at once the sea returned to its bed, and covered Pharaoh’s chariots. Not a single one of them was left. ...That day YAHWEH rescued Yisrael from the Egyptians, and Yisrael saw the Egyptians lying dead on the shore, and the people venerated YAHWEH; they put their faith in YAHWEH and in Mosheh, his servant.
There is no difficulty in interpreting this chapter as historical, but written as an epic. Even the non-specialist reader will easily recognize the two juxtaposed traditions: to begin with, the sea ‘driven back with a strong easterly wind all night’ (Yahwistic cycle) is mentioned; and a few lines lower down there is a more spectacular account of the division of the water into two walls on either side of the improvised path-way (Kohen cycle). It is clear that this miraculous crossing of the Sea of Reeds has been told and retold during the centuries, embellished by the popular imagination and amplified. This episode is among the strangest and most moving in Yisrael’s history. It was carefully recorded in Jewish chronicles, in “Christian” tradition, and even among Mohammedans.
It was inevitable that the Scriptural account should have been strongly attacked in the rationalist quarters at the end of the last century. Today believers, while agreeing that, in the circumstances, natural phenomena may have been made use of by YAHWEH, admit that from the literary point of view the account is mingled with ‘epic’ tradition, but can be disentangled from it.
An explanation of the crossing of the Red Sea; Yisrael witnessed the great act that YAHWEH had performed
There is no need to rationalize this famous story in the Scripture, nor is there any intention of doing so here. But a more thorough investigation, enlisting the help of modern scientific knowledge, is certainly not out of place.
It is worthwhile recalling that at Migdol in the time of Mosheh there was a real extension of the Sea of Reeds (the Egyptian name of the Red Sea) in existence, so that it was quite correct to speak of ‘the crossing of the Red Sea’. But this arm was very narrow and usually dry, or at least reduced to a series of inter-connected marshes, flooded by certain tides. Before the excavation of the Suez Canal there was the bed of a gulf that was filled at intervals. These quagmires were frequently dried out by a strong east wind (as the Scripture observes). This was the fearsome sirocco, blowing up from the desert and drying up all the moisture from the earth and sky. The fortress of Migdol had been built at this precise point on the southern end of the Bitter lakes to keep watch on the ford, the starting point of the caravan route for Asia. Mosheh obviously knew all these places.
There is no need to deny the historical authenticity of the story, and therefore to exclude the possibility of the ‘strong east wind’ being providential. It dried up the marshes and enabled a guide with some knowledge of the route to take advantage of the situation and lead the Hebrews dryshod over at least some of the fords. In early morning, the wind slackened, the sea came back over the marshes, and the Egyptian chariots which were just too late in pursuing the Yisraelites, could not escape being engulfed, It was by no means unusual for these unwieldy machines with their heavy wheels to suffer serious accidents.
Probably the affair would not have much impressed the Egyptian authorities, and there is no record of it in their chronicles. They had wanted to recapture for forced labour a small body of Canaanite nomads escaping to Asia and had dispatched a military detachment after them for the purpose, but at the ford at Migdol it was caught by the rising tide, with the loss of some of the chariots and drivers, For the Egyptians it was merely a frontier incident. But for the Hebrews it was one of the most amazing and important events of their history. Yisrael witnessed the great act that YAHWEH had performed against the Egyptians, and the people venerated YAHWEH; they put their faith in YAHWEH and in Mosheh, his servant.
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