#Exodus 15:1-18

The Song of the Sea

I’m honestly not entirely sure how to do this in just a few tweets: multiple entire monographs have been written about this poem, and there are a million angles to take on it. I’ll try and just make a few brief statements.

1. The song is obviously an originally independent piece, as are most of the embedded poems in the Pentateuch. Just on content alone, Moses isn’t going to sing about how YHWH took Israel past the other nations and planted them on his holy mountain; that hasn’t happened yet.

2. The poem may be older than much of the Pentateuch, but it might not be that old: if 15:13 and 17 refer to the temple - and it looks like they do - then the song can’t be like 12th century BCE as some have thought.

3. Does that mean that the old-timey language in the poem isn’t archaic, but is actually an archaism? I’m not sure - I suspect that older language lived on in poetry longer than it did in prose, as is the case in English as well.

4. Regardless of age, the song comes in two major sections: the battle scene in 15:1-12, and the guidance scene in 15:13-17. (15:18 is a nice hymnic tag line.) Some argue that these were originally separate poems, since the content shifts so dramatically.

I don’t think so (usually). All sorts of poetic structures and linguistic features run right over the dividing line. The argument for separating the poem into two is the same as the argument that there couldn’t be continuous narrative sources.

Some scholars want a single text to do a single thing. Which is a remnant of the old “they weren’t smart enough yet to know how to write complicated works” argument. If prose authors could connect primeval history and patriarchs, e.g., a poet could connect these two themes.

5. The battle scene in the first part of the poem was not originally about the Exodus, or the event described in prose in Exodus 14. It is a hymn to YHWH’s military victory, at a body of water. Egypt is mentioned only in 14:4 - there is no other context related to the Exodus.

You couldn’t come close to reconstructing the narrative context or content of Exodus 14 from this song - it’s only because we have the prose first that we assume the song is describing that event. In fact, it’s probably quite the opposite.

I think it more likely that the prose accounts are building off the song, creating an Exodus event on the basis of this hymn. J in particular looks to follow the song pretty well, but P has some connections too.

Point is, the independent song wasn’t about Israel’s escape from slavery in Egypt any more than the song in Gen 49 was about Jacob’s deathbed blessing of his sons. Those are the context in which the independent songs have been set.

6. As was true also for Gen 49, it was J who did the setting. The song is older and independent, but it came into the text here as part of J’s story. (But wait until tomorrow’s thread.)

Okay I’ll stop there. I teach this poem all the time, in poetry classes, Hebrew classes, Exodus classes. There’s always more to say and see.

One more. Tradition-critically, the song absolutely stands in line with the narratives of Exod 14. Here’s an earlier version of “YHWH defeats Egypt at the sea,” along with mythic YHWH vs. water concepts. This poem is the tradition that the narratives each took up.