Monday, October 5, 2026 · Week of Pentecost 19
Exodus 15:1–10
Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the Lord:
“I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;
horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.
2 The Lord is my strength and my might,
and he has become my salvation;
this is my God, and I will praise him;
my father’s God, and I will exalt him.
3 The Lord is a warrior;
the Lord is his name.
4 Pharaoh’s chariots and his army he cast into the sea;
his elite officers were sunk in the Red Sea.
5 The floods covered them;
they went down into the depths like a stone.
6 Your right hand, O Lord, glorious in power—
your right hand, O Lord, shattered the enemy.
7 In the greatness of your majesty you overthrew your adversaries;
you sent out your fury; it consumed them like stubble.
8 At the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up;
the floods stood up in a heap;
the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea.
9 The enemy said, ‘I will pursue; I will overtake;
I will divide the spoil; my desire shall have its fill of them.
I will draw my sword; my hand shall destroy them.’
10 You blew with your wind; the sea covered them;
they sank like lead in the mighty waters.
20 Then the prophet Miriam, Aaron’s sister, took a tambourine in her hand, and all the women went out after her with tambourines and with dancing. 21 And Miriam sang to them:
“Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;
horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.”
Notes
This song is among the oldest pieces of literature in the Bible. Its Hebrew is older than the prose story around it. We know this thanks to some truly archaic use of the Hebrew language.
And the song probably started with a woman. At the end of the chapter, "the prophet Miriam, Aaron's sister," takes a tambourine, the women follow her dancing, and she sings this same opening line (15:20–21). A scribe is far more likely to move a woman's song to Moses than to take one of Moses' songs and give it to his sister.
"The Lord is a warrior" is, in Hebrew, YHWH ish milhamah, "the Lord is a man of war." The warrior-God imagery runs all through the song: a right hand that shatters the enemy, fury that burns them like stubble. We shouldn’t sand it down. Escaped slaves sang this with the army that hunted them lying dead on the seashore (14:30). Chariots were the most advanced weapons of their day, and God sided with the people on foot. Of course they sang. However, in the Talmud (Sanhedrin 39b), the angels want to sing that night, and God rebukes them: "The work of my hands is drowning in the sea, and you would sing before me?" Both things are true: Liberation is worth celebrating, and God grieves every Egyptian in the water.
Across Scripture, the sea is where chaos lives. Verses 5 and 8 both use tehomot, which the NRSVue translates "floods" and then "deeps." It's the plural of tehom, the "deep" that darkness covered in Genesis 1:2 before God spoke. Israel's neighbors told stories of gods battling sea monsters to make the world. The Bible keeps a few of those monsters, Leviathan and Rahab, as creatures God masters, and Isaiah fuses that old battle with this one: "Was it not you who cut Rahab in pieces, who pierced the dragon? Was it not you who dried up the sea, the waters of the great deep?" (Isaiah 51:9–10). In this song, though, the sea isn't the enemy. God piles it up with a breath/ruah and turns it on Pharaoh. Jesus’ disciples met the same power on a smaller sea: "Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?" (Mark 4:41).
Questions for reflection
Why do you think the tradition put Moses' name on a song that likely began with Miriam? Whose songs get credited to someone else today?
The Israelites sing over a drowned army, and the rabbis imagine God refusing to sing. Where have you had to hold celebration and grief at the same time?
