Mennonite Weekly Review

Yesterday’s winners are today’s losers, and vice versa. After Joseph dies, we enter a 400-year silence during which yesterday’s privileged Hebrews become today’s beaten-down slaves. Only then does Yahweh groom another Egyptian prince as the human instrument to carry out a divine plan to redeem these slaves. Was it his Hebrew genes or the burning bush which drives Moses to reject his royal heritage and become midwife as Yahweh births the chosen people? (Num. 11:11-15).

Our text in Exodus 15 skips over the fierce contest between Yahweh and the gods of Egypt, who are defeated one by one through each of the 10 plagues. The final demise of the Egyptian army in the Red (or Reed) Sea calls forth what is traditionally called the Song of Moses, or the Song of the Sea.

Hebrew poetry for dancing women

There are several directions in which this song could take us. We could examine it as a majestic example of Hebrew poetry, with its two-line repetition echoing Yahweh’s superiority among the gods. As one of the oldest texts in our scriptures, it is usually dated to the late 12th or early 11th century B.C. The song covers Israel’s further travels on the way to Canaan and ends at Yahweh’s own abode, Mount Sinai (15:17).

Second, we could challenge the authorship. Moses pours forth praise for 18 verses, followed by one short paragraph (verses 20-21) in which “the prophet Miriam, Aaron’s sister,” takes a tambourine and leads all the women in singing only one verse of the same song. But Hebrew scholar Phyllis Trible claims that the whole poem should be called “The Song of Miriam” because of the association of women with victory songs. “It belongs,” she says, “to a corpus of women’s traditions that include the long Songs of Deborah (Judges 5:1-31) and Hannah (1 Sam 2:1-10).” When you read this poem, think of women singing and dancing in a victory march.

Ethical dilemmas over God’s violence

The third avenue of exploration is theological and moral. Is God violent? The salvation of the Hebrews is bought with the slaughter of the entire Egyptian army. Yahweh’s wind drives the sea back to allow the Israelites to walk through on dry land (14:21-22). But as the army follows, God closes the path and all are drowned (26-28).

Ex. 15:3 exults, “Yahweh is a warrior!” A book with the same title by Millard Lind (1980) emphasizes that in their early history, Israel had no standing army and depended on God working through nature miracles to fight for them. The equally early Song of Deborah records another such event (Judges 5). Leaders like Moses, Miriam and Deborah were prophets and judges rather than warriors. Only when Israel begged for a king — against the prophet Samuel’s objections — did they become militaristic and brutal like the nations around them.

But a 2010 book, Disturbing Divine Behavior, by Eric Seibert, a pacifist, confronts and questions both Israelite violence and also Yahweh’s violence in such stories as these and in the Great Flood when wicked and innocent alike are drowned (Genesis 7). And even if the Israelites at the Red Sea do no violence, they rejoice in enemy deaths.

Is it moral to watch and rejoice over the deaths of one’s enemies? Surely readers know the iconic Anabaptist engraving of Dirk Willems saving his pursuer from drowning in the river, even at the cost of his own life. Were the early Anabaptists more ethical than these early Israelites? Who will write a poem for Dirk Willems?