Tuesday, October 6, 2026 · Week of Pentecost 19
Exodus 15:22–27
22 Then Moses ordered Israel to set out from the Red Sea, and they went into the wilderness of Shur. They went three days in the wilderness and found no water. 23 When they came to Marah, they could not drink the water of Marah because it was bitter. That is why it was called Marah.
24 And the people complained against Moses, saying, “What shall we drink?”
25 He cried out to the Lord, and the Lord showed him a piece of wood; he threw it into the water, and the water became sweet.
There the Lord made for them a statute and an ordinance, and there he put them to the test. 26 He said, “If you will listen carefully to the voice of the Lord your God, and do what is right in his sight, and give heed to his commandments and keep all his statutes, I will not bring upon you any of the diseases that I brought upon the Egyptians, for I am the Lord who heals you.”
27 Then they came to Elim, where there were twelve springs of water and seventy palm trees, and they camped there by the water.
Notes
Moses and Aaron asked Pharaoh for "a three days' journey into the wilderness" (5:3). Now they get one. Israel walks three days into the wilderness of Shur and finds no water, and the first water they do find, at Marah, is undrinkable. The name says it: מָרָה (marah), "bitter." Yesterday's reading had them singing on the shore. Three days later they're asking, "What shall we drink?"
The rabbis noticed those three days. The Talmud (Bava Kamma 82a) makes a metaphor of the missing water, making it Torah, by way of Isaiah 55:1, "Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters." Israel went three days without it and started grumbling, and that's the traditional reason synagogues read Torah aloud on Monday, Thursday, and the Sabbath, so that three days never pass without it. As someone who writes about the Bible every morning, I'm partial to that reading!
Robert Alter notes that everything about verse 25 is "uncertain." The second half reads, "there he set for him a statute and an ordinance, and there he tested him." Nobody is actually named. We have to guess that God is the one setting and testing, though some readers think it's Moses. "Him" is singular, so it could mean Moses or Israel taken as one body, and the NRSVue translates it as “them.”
The bigger puzzle is the statute itself. No law gets handed down in this episode. Rashi filled the gap with the Sabbath, the red heifer, and civil law, but the text doesn't name any of that. It could be that the statute is the pattern: the people cry out, and God meets the need. Israel's first lesson in the wilderness is a stick that turns bitter water sweet. (The Mekhilta, an early rabbinic commentary on Exodus, reads the wood as Torah itself, "a tree of life to those who lay hold of her," Proverbs 3:18.)
Verse 26 then lays out conditions, and they sound like a threat: listen to God, or get the diseases Egypt got. Look at the order, though. God sweetens the water first, for people who had just been grumbling at Moses, and talks about commandments afterward. The name God takes here is ani YHWH rofe'ekha, "I am the Lord who heals you," and the first thing healed is the water.
The parallel to this passage is Numbers 20, where Israel thirsts again and Moses famously fails the test. God tells him to speak to the rock; he strikes it twice, and God tells him he won't lead the people into the land (Numbers 20:8–12).
Then Elim, with twelve springs and seventy palm trees. The numbers are formulaic. Twelve is the tribes. Seventy is the elders who will go up the mountain with Moses (24:1, 9), and it echoes the seventy members of Jacob's family who went down into Egypt in the first place (1:5). After one bitter pool at Marah, Elim has a spring for every tribe and a palm for every elder.
Questions for reflection
Verse 25 never says what the "statute and ordinance" at Marah were. What do you think Israel learned there, before Sinai and before any law was written down?
Israel went from singing at the sea to bitter water in three days. When has a high moment turned bitter that fast for you, and what did you need in that place?
