The Song of the Sea

Reflections on the Lectionary for September 17th

AI-generated image, from the promt “old quilt”

By now, several hundred years into the critical study of the Bible, it won’t be controversial to most of the readers of this Substack to say that the Bible is a composite book. Yes, it’s a collection—an anthology of books collected together under one cover. But zoom in even further, and it becomes clear that the books of the Bible themselves are made up of thousands of bits and fragments, stitched and pressed together into a whole. Most books of the Bible are like that: they look more like a quilt than a whole cloth, and more like a patched-up and rebuilt house than a new building. Almost everywhere you look in the Bible, you can find evidence that it is composed of pieces brought together over wide swaths of space and time, by countless unnamed people.

It stands to reason that some of those pieces will be older and others will be newer, some will be rougher and others more refined, some will be clearer and others more confusing. Many of them will contradict each other, or tell the same stories differently. The bringing-together of material across difference is one of the things that makes the Bible interesting, in my opinion. Like a city that has been inhabited for a long time, the layers go deep, and there is always something new to discover. The old and the new exist on top of each other and beside each other, and the old and the new are in dialogue across time.

In this week’s lectionary list, we can see a couple of the layers on top of each other, or to be more precise, right next to each other. Exodus 14:19-31 and Exodus 15:1b-11 and 20-21 (which is an alternate reading in place of the Psalm) are adjacent to each other in this list of readings, and they are right next to each other in the biblical text; the first passage flows right into the second. But they are far more complicated than that. The first text is likely (but not definitively) much newer, and the second text is probably (though not certainly) much older. The two texts show up right next to each other in the book of Exodus, but that’s not because they were written down that way, in that order, by a single author (Moses, traditionally). Instead, those two texts show up together in Exodus because they were both collected as part of a set of traditions about the flight from Egypt, and because an editor (or “redactor,” often, in scholarship) put them there in that way.

To me, the second passage (Exodus 15:1-18, which gets chopped up a bit by the lectionary selections) is the far more interesting of the two passages. The earlier passage from chapter 14 is compelling too, but it’s a fairly standard recitation of God’s saving action during the crossing of the Red Sea. (If you’re still thinking about hierophanies and theophanies after last week, you might notice the angel in 14:19 and the pillar of cloud later in that same verse, which appear in this text as complementary or paired examples of divine presence). But chapter 15 is special for a few reasons.

Scholars often call this section of chapter 15 the Song of the Sea, or sometimes the Song of Moses, though that risks confusion with a different Song of Moses in Deuteronomy. This song, 15:1-18, is said to have been sung by Moses and the Israelites after their deliverance from the Egyptians. It’s related to the Song of Miriam, a much shorter composition, that appears at the end of the lectionary reading, in 15:21—another fragment, this one also probably out of chronological order. The Song of Miriam reads, in full, “Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” The Song of the Sea begins with a quotation of Miriam’s song, and then expands upon it, drawing on themes of the divine warrior (a common motif in the theologies of the ancient near east), the chaos and generative power of water, and a catalog of Israel’s neighbors/enemies. It’s a salvation history; it tells the story of God’s saving work on behalf of Israel. The Song of Miriam, and the Song of the Sea that quotes it, are the kinds of bits of memory and tradition of which the Bible is made up. They’re the squares and scraps in the quilt.

One of the fascinating features of these particular scraps, the Song of the Sea and the Song of Miriam, are that they are written in archaic language. (Imagine that you were reading a text in modern English, and suddenly came across a section full of thees and thous and the kinds of odd spellings you see in Shakespeare—that would be a signal to you that the passage was from an earlier form of English, and therefore much older than the rest of the text and written in a time well before you were reading it). That means that the Hebrew of this passage is older or more primitive than the rest of Exodus. That suggests (but does not prove) that these songs are especially ancient—that they might be oral traditions preserved in a written text, imported mostly unchanged from an earlier time. That would make sense, if you think about it: the authors/editors/redactors of Exodus might have collected traditions about the past, and used them as building blocks (or quilt squares) from which to compose the larger work. That helps to account for why the same story is told in different ways several times in a row, mostly out of order. Miriam’s song might be the oldest, even though it comes last, and the Song of the Sea might have come next as an expansion on the Song of Miriam, and then finally the material in chapter 14 as a narrativized and theologized version of them both, with the latest version coming first in the text.

It’s also possible that this is a case of what is sometimes called “archaizing” texts, ones that pretend to be older than they are in order to gain authority or authenticity for themselves. Archaizing texts appear in different places—among the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, and on certain coins from the Hasmonean period of Judea—as ways to signal allegiance to the past, or connection to it. A useful analogy might be the way marketing sometimes works in our own time. I remember a store when I was a kid was called Ye Olde Shoppe, which I suppose was meant to evoke the kind of experience and products you might find inside. Or, I’ve seen candy stores that use an old-English font for their name, I suppose to signal to customers that the candy would be especially traditional or quaint. For archaizing texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls, sometimes they used an older Hebrew script for the name of God, or for a bit of text that was otherwise special in some way. It’s a way of setting some words or stories apart as different. So, it’s possible that this older-sounding Song of the Sea and Song of Miriam are like that—compositions in the “present” of the editors of Exodus (2500 years ago, give or take), meant to sound and look older than they were.

But to me, the more convincing option is the one I discussed above, which is that these are very old fragments of tradition about the exodus that have been brought into the editor’s present and embedded in the text. If that’s true, then it establishes, at the very least, that a story about divine intervention was a historical memory—something that was remembered and told about for a long time. The only real details of Miriam’s song—that horses and riders were thrown into the sea—might have been details from a deep past that were preserved in song.

This is not the same thing as proving that the exodus from Egypt was a historical event. Notice that the Song of Miriam does not mention Egypt, a pharaoh, Israelites, slavery, a promised land, or anyone named Moses. It’s a long, long way from being an ancient text about an escape from Egypt. Even the (possibly later) Song of the Sea barely mentions these things. It’s a memory of a divinely-fueled triumph, but not necessarily of a historical event of the same type as the exodus. It's only in that introductory section in chapter 14—probably written in the editor of Exodus’s own time—that we get the full story as it plugs in nicely to the story told by Exodus. The Song of Miriam and the Song of the Sea might be about the events of the exodus, but then again they might not be. It’s also possible that they were retrofitted into the story of the exodus, or that they were expanded over time to take the shape of the story we now see in the book of Exodus. It’s not always easy to reconstruct the past.

But like a very old city where modern streets sit atop older foundations and ancient objects, or like a new quilt made up of older scraps of someone’s worn-out clothing or remnants, this section of Exodus is making something new out of some old things. It’s taking received traditions—perhaps received through song and story—and it’s turning it into a narrative about God’s saving power. In fact, this part of Exodus is not just turning these things into a narrative, it’s turning them into the narrative, arguably the central and most important story told by ancient Israel. It’s a story that sits at the heart of what Israel claimed about its God in the past, and what different people who claim that story today—Jews, Christians, and others—say is true about God in the present. This story gets repeated and retold and referenced dozens of times throughout the Hebrew Bible, as warrant for Israel’s special relationship with God, and as proof of God’s special concern for Israel. There’s something satisfying about the idea that the most important story might be the oldest story too.

To me, this one of the things that’s so compelling about the Bible. On Sunday, those who follow the lectionary are especially invited to think about this text and to think with this story. When you do that, you’re telling the story again, and you’re joining a long line of people and communities who have told this story, at a minimum, for two and a half millennia, and quite possibly longer than that. You’re taking something very old, and you’re stitching it into a new quilt, and you’re seeing what shape it can take today. You’re singing an old song in a new voice. “Sing to the Lord,” Miriam sang, “for he has triumphed gloriously.” Sing it, and listen to the way it sounds.