Caught Between the Red Sea and the Sea Monster
The parting of the sea in Exodus 14 & 15.
This is the 12th part of our series examining the image of water in the Bible. Over the next months, we’ll be looking at these verses to follow the image of water as it flows from Genesis to Revelation.
We are looking at the crossing of the Sea of Reeds (yam suf), or the Red Sea, in Exodus 14:1-15:18. It is a long section, so I won’t quote it in full, but here are a few key verses as a refresher.
The Lord said to Moses, “Why do you cry to me? Tell the people of Israel to go forward. Lift up your staff, and stretch out your hand over the sea and divide it, that the people of Israel may go through the sea on dry ground. (Exodus 14:15, 16)
“Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and the Lord drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided. And the people of Israel went into the midst of the sea on dry ground, the waters being a wall to them on their right hand and on their left.” (Exodus 14:21, 22)
“Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods?
Who is like you, majestic in holiness,
awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders? (Exodus 15:11)
The Story of Exodus Begins in Genesis
In Genesis 12, we meet man, later called Abraham, who God tells to leave his home in Babylon and go to a land in the east which will be the inheritance of his descendants. God promises to make Abraham’s family great and tells him through his family all the families of the earth would be blessed. The rest of Genesis follows the adventure of the fulfillment of the promise.
Four generations later, the family has grown larger, but one son, Joseph is missing and presumed dead. His eleven brothers know the truth: they sold Joseph into slavery. But God has other plans, as Joseph will later tell his brothers at the moment of their reconciliation, “What you intended for evil, God intended for good.”
Still a slave, Joseph finds his way to Egypt, and, because God is with him, is elevated to become a prince of the kingdom. His position of power allows him to save his family from a famine by bringing them all down to Egypt. Centuries pass and the descendants of Abraham have become so numerous that the power brokers of Egypt enslave and oppress them to keep them under control.
God’s promise to Abraham never looked further from coming true. First, they are numerous, but they are slaves. Secondly, they are not in the land of their promised inheritance, they are in Egypt. Enter Moses.
God raises up Moses and brings him into conflict with the Pharaoh of Egypt over the fate of the family of Abraham. Through the ten plagues, God confronts the power structures of Egypt and the Hebrews are released. They leave Egypt in the direction of the promised land, but are caught at the Sea of Reeds when Pharaoh changes his mind and sends his army after them. The people panic. They see Pharaoh’s army behind them and only the water before them. Moses asks God to help them and just before parting the waters of the sea, God tells them, “The Lord will fight for you, you have only to be silent.”
The Parting of the Waters
This story is full of echoes of events that have already taken place in the Pentateuch, specifically during the creation in Genesis 1-2 and the flood in Genesis 6-9.
On the first day of creation, God separated the light from the darkness, calling one day and the other night. On the second day, God separated the waters from the waters, creating the “waters above” and the “waters below.” On the third day, God parted the water again, but this time he parted them horizontally instead of vertically as he separated the land from the sea.
Now in Exodus 14, God’s people have come to the brink of the sea and the land and they need God to make a way for them where there is no way. He does so by separating the waters horizontally again.
This time, however, the young Hebrew nation is caught between the hammer and the anvil. The army of Pharaoh is coming close behind them, and their plight reveals new meanings and significance in what the parting of the waters always meant. The forces of evil pursue them from behind. The forces of evil block their way ahead, symbolized by the sea. Just as in Genesis 1 and the narrative of the flood in Genesis 6-9, God provides a path through the flood, a place of refuge that is surrounded by evil and chaos but is still safe.
Just as in Genesis 1, there is again a wind (ruach, spirit) hovering over the waters. Now, instead of hovering like a bird over the abyss as in the opening words of Genesis, this wind sweeps over the Hebrews and drives the waters apart. The point is: the water was utterly subdued and controlled by the spirit of God and the dry ground became a place of safety for them. Just as in Genesis 1, God has made the waters of chaos and death into “dry land” and a place of safety.
Dry Land and the Mountain of God
It is no accident that the same word for dry land (yabbashah) describes both the land revealed by the parting of the waters in Exodus 14:21 and the land that appears in Genesis 1 on the third day when God parts the waters horizontally for the first time. In using the same word, the text links the meaning of the dry land in the two passages.
The dry land is something God founded over and against the chaotic waters. It is a place of safety amid danger and disorder. The third day of Genesis 1 involves both the creation of the dry land and the first living things to grow on the new dry land. God clears away the chaos, then he plants a garden.
The song in Exodus 15 picks up the connection to Genesis 1 and 2 when it says, “You will plant us on your own mountain,” and “You will lead us by your strength to your holy abode.” Remember, in the ancient Hebrew imagination, the dry land of Genesis 1 was not a flat plain, but a high mountain. So Exodus 15 ties the crossing of the sea back to Eden. First, God deals with the two evils menacing his people (Pharoah and the sea) and then he will plant a garden.
The Narrative and the Song
Exodus 14 recounts the crossing of the sea in narrative form. The very next chapter tells the story of the same events but in poetic form.
When we look closely at the two chapters, interesting differences in how the event is described appear. In particular, the song draws imagery and language from other moments in the Old Testament and brings them into the story of the parting of the waters to deepen and reveal the meanings associated with that event.
One such difference, as John Sailhamer points out, is that in the narrative Pharaoh’s army is drowned when the waters close back in on them. In the song, Pharaoh’s army is “thrown into the sea” (15:1) and “went down into the depths like a stone” (15:5). This is perhaps a link to Exodus 1:22 when Pharaoh commands the Hebrew sons to be thrown into the Nile to drown. God did to the Egyptians what they did to the Hebrews.
In the narrative in Exodus 14, the Lord sends a wind to divide the sea; in the song in Exodus 15, it is the “blast of [the Lord’s] nostrils” that makes the water “stand up in a heap” and the “deeps congeal in the heart of the sea.” Why does the poetic form of the event anthropomorphize God sending the wind? Why does the wind come from God’s nostrils? The word translated as nostrils has a triple meaning: nostrils, face, and anger. Using this word to describe what God does to the sea reinforces the description of God’s anger the song is already relating (“You send out your fury; it consumes them like stubble” Exodus 15:7).
It also evokes moments when God’s breath and nostrils have been referred to together before. In Genesis 2:7, God breathed the breath of life into Adam’s nostrils and he became a living creation. When the waters of the flood finally come in Genesis 7:22, the text picks up the same language to describe the destruction: “Everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died.” Humanity used the life God breathed into them to choose death and God’s answer is the water. As Pharaoh’s army plunges into the channel opened in the sea, God brings back the chaotic waters that once flooded the earth because of human wickedness to once again protect his people and put an end to the evil endangering them. Once again, the flood is his answer to human evil.
The song looks backward to the event that just happened and also looks forward to the future of the Hebrew people. Exodus 15 even talks about the inhabitants of Canaan (the contemporary occupants of the Hebrew’s future home) being filled with dread because of the miraculous events of Exodus 14, and even alludes to the establishment of the temple in Jerusalem which won’t happen until Solomon’s day.
Water and the Enemies of God
We see some interesting things when later writers look back on this event. For one, Pharaoh is often described as a tannin, one of the sea monsters from Genesis 1:20. From Genesis 1 onwards, tannin becomes one of the ways the Bible describes its monsters, the creatures that represent the (physical and spiritual) forces of evil who oppose God.
As the exodus from Egypt becomes an archetypal story of deliverance, so Pharoah becomes conflated with one of the archetypal symbols of evil in the Bible, a serpent, dragon, or sea monster, often being given the name “Rahab.”
Take a look at these verses:
“Egypt’s help is worthless and empty; therefore I have called her ‘Rahab who sits still.’” (Isaiah 30:7)
“By his power he stilled the sea; by his understanding he shattered Rahab.” (Job 26:12)
“Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord;
Awake as in the days of old, the generations of long ago.
Was it not You who cut Rahab in pieces,
Who pierced the dragon?
Was it not You who dried up the sea,
The waters of the great deep;
Who made the depths of the sea a pathway
For the redeemed to cross over? (Isaiah 51:9, 10)“You rule the surging of the sea;
When its waves rise, You calm them.
You Yourself crushed Rahab like one who is slain;
You scattered Your enemies with Your mighty arm.” (Psalm 89:9, 10)
The prophets and the psalmist are doing several things at once by depicting Egypt and her pharaoh in monstrous terms. Some scholars argue that they are undermining Egyptian and other ancient near-eastern creation myths, which tell of local gods defeating ancient monsters to found their empires (as in the battle between Marduk and Tiamat in the Enuma Elish.) If this is the case, then the Bible is effectively saying, “My God easily surpassed the feats of your god because he is that much greater.”
By personifying the forces of evil with the character of Pharoah, the biblical writers are also situating themselves in a certain place in the narrative, namely, as the good guys in flight from archetypal evil.
Tying Egypt into the language of the sea monster also calls out the darker spiritual powers that also get connected to the biblical pattern of the sea monster/dragon. From the serpent in Genesis 3 to the dragon in Revelation 12:9, this monstrous image refers to the spiritual forces of evil that lurk “behind the throne” and influence events on Earth.
Photo by Aviv Ben Or on Unsplash