The Song of the Sea I (Exod 15:1-12)

Do you have a favourite Christian song or hymn? I remember in my gap year spent overseas, a friend introduced me to Michael Card songs and ‘That’s what faith must be’ became one of my favourites. Whenever it pops into my head, it still lifts my heart and makes me smile. It brings back memories of that wonderful year of learning and growing spiritually when I first heard it and the lyrics remind me of the faith that can grasp the unseen reality of Christ in me. Though this is a simple song and may not be to everyone’s taste, songs can often connect us to God’s truth more deeply at a heart level than a sermon. I suspect that the song in Exodus 15 did something similar for Israel. It tells of Israel’s redemption and God’s power in exuberant terms.

The song has an upward and downward movement that is like the rising and falling of waves.[1] It is upward in praising God who is highly exalted, extolled, majestic and great. His enemies, the Egyptians, who try to rise against Him in arrogance and usurp His place are hurled into the sea, sinking like stone or lead into the depth and being swallowed up by the earth (probably meaning the underworld here). This is a well-known pattern in the OT: God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble (James 4:6; Prov 3:34). This is not a grovelling-in-the-dirt kind of humiliation, but a simple recognition that we are not gods, yet God, our God is fighting our battles and helps us when we are helpless. 

Although it is less obvious in English, the Hebrew of the poem is strongly reminiscent of Genesis 1 and creation language. There Gen 1:2 describes ‘the deep’ (tehom) over which God’s Spirit (or wind – the Hebrew ruaḥ means both) hovered. As we read on, it also becomes clear that this ‘deep’ was water that God divided or gathered to create the dry land (Gen 1:9). Additionally, waters, especially tehom, carried the association of chaos for Israel because they were familiar with the myths of the ancient Near East where the creation of the world was told as a battle between the gods, one side represented by the primeval waters of chaos, the other standing for order and eventually winning the victory.[2]

In our song in Exodus, the deeps (tehomot) are mentioned twice (Exod 15:5, 8) and dry land is created and covered again by God’s wind or breath (ruaḥ in Exod 15:8, 10). Unlike the ancient myths, God is not fighting the waters, however, but easily controls them as part of His creation. The movement of dividing the waters is reminiscent of creation: just as God created the earth by dividing the waters, he now creates a people (Israel) by the same action. Conversely, the bringing together of the waters is a form of judgment (compare the flood in Genesis 7, where the waters above and below come together and the dry land disappears). No wonder the song exclaims ‘Who is like You among the gods?’ (Exod 15:11).[3]

Through the imagery of escaping the waters of death, so rich in associations, Israel remembers the amazing power of God over chaos, the forces of nature and enemies who try to enslave and destroy them. It encourages us that God is more than able to deal with our various life situations when we turn to Him for help. As at creation and at the exodus, His Word or breath is enough to bring new life into being (Ps 33:6-8), to control the forces of our circumstances, to open new pathways where there were only obstacles before and to free us from the powers that enslave us. 

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[1] William H.C. Propp, Exodus 1-18, AYB 2 (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1999), 510.

[2] This association is probably why some psalms describe distress with the imagery of water (e.g. Ps 18:16; Ps 32:6; Ps 88:6-7) and God’s power as mastery over water (e.g. Ps 33:6-8; Ps 93:3-4). Israel, of course, did not believe these myths but the imagery and language was part of their cultural world. To give a modern-day example, we may talk about ‘the survival of the fittest’ without ever having read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species or without accepting his evolutionary theory as true. Likewise, we may use the proverb, ‘You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you meet your prince’ without having read Grimm’s fairy tale or without believing that frogs literally turn into princes.

[3] Whether Israel at this stage thought of other gods as existing but less powerful than YHWH or if they knew that those were not really gods is unclear. However, they did come to understand this later (e.g. Ps 135:5, 15).