The Desert Sealed With Wild Beasts at the Red Sea

The sand was still warm from the day when the first scream went up from the rear of the camp. Israel had stopped at the edge of the water because there was no more ground to walk on. In front of them the sea heaved and broke and heaved again, dark and loud, throwing spray into faces that had never seen so much water in their lives. Behind them, far off but closing, a low thunder rolled across the flats. Not a storm. Hooves. Wheels. Iron.

They had been slaves a week ago. Now they stood pressed between the roar of the deep and the roar of the chariots, and a mother near the front turned her child's face away from the water so the boy would not watch it move.

The Army Behind Them

The dust on the eastern horizon thickened into shapes. Horses first, then the high boxes of the chariots, then the glint that meant men in armor standing in them with whips and spears. Pharaoh had changed his mind, the way the powerful always change their mind once the gift is given and the giver is gone. He wanted his slaves back, or he wanted them dead, and to a man on a chariot those two wishes weigh the same.

The ground itself carried the sound up through bare feet. A man could feel the coming army in his heels before he could see it in his eyes. Some in the camp began to count the chariots and stopped counting. There were too many, and they were too fast, and the only thing faster than a chariot on open flats is the panic of people who have nowhere to run.

The One Door Left

An old shepherd lifted his arm and pointed south, away from the water and away from the army, into the broken yellow country that climbed toward the hills. The desert. No chariot could keep its wheels in that sand. No army would march its horses into waterless rock to chase a crowd of scattering families. Let them split into a hundred little bands, the thinking ran, slip into the wadis, vanish into the wilderness the way smoke vanishes. The strong would survive. Some would survive.

It was the one direction that looked like a door. Pharaoh, watching from his own lines, said of them that they were lost and wandering in the land, that the desert had closed in on them (Exodus 14:3). He meant it as a sneer, a king laughing at slaves who had walked themselves into a corner. He did not know he was saying something truer than he understood. The word he used for closed, sagar, to shut, to seal, was about to mean exactly what it said.

What Waited in the Sand

The first scouts who broke from the crowd and ran for the open wilderness did not get far. A boy outpacing his father heard it before he saw it, a low sound in the rocks that was not wind. Then the shape rose out of the shadow of a boulder, yellow on yellow, muscle and teeth, and it did not flee from the running men the way a desert animal flees. It held the path. Behind it, in the next gully and the next, more of them waited, lions and the lean killing things of the dry country, set across every gap like sentries at a gate.

The desert was not empty. The desert was full. Every trail that might have carried a frightened family to safety had a beast standing in it that would not give way. The boy backed up the way he had come, and his father caught him, and the two of them returned to the crowd at the water with the news that the last door was not a door at all. It had teeth. The wilderness had been sealed against them as surely as a hand seals a jar.

Three Walls and No Fourth

So the count was finished, and it was a count of walls. The sea in front, alive and impassable. The army behind, alive and murderous. And the desert at their flank, which had looked like mercy and turned out to be the third wall, the one that closed the last gap a body could have slipped through. Sealed in by water, by iron, and by claw. A people who had just been told they were free stood inside a box with no lid only because the sky had nothing in it yet to fall on them.

The mother who had turned her child from the water now had nowhere left to turn him toward. Every horizon was a sentence. The crowd's voice rose into one long sound that was half prayer and half the noise animals make when they are cornered, and even that sound seemed to confirm the trap, because there was no quiet place left in any direction for it to go.

The Sealing and the Closing

That the desert could be shut with beasts was not a thing anyone there had to imagine. It had been done before, or it would be remembered as having been done, in a far country and a king's pit, where a man was thrown to the lions and lived to say of it, "My God sent His messenger and closed the lions' mouths, and they did not wound me" (Daniel 6:23). Closed. The same act, the same sealing, the same word turned to the same use. A power that can shut the mouths of lions to spare one man can open them to fence in a whole people, and the hand that does the one does the other.

Which is the terror folded inside the rescue. The same God who would split the water in front of them had filled the sand beside them, so that when the sea finally tore open down its dry middle and the walls of it stood up on either hand, there was exactly one road out of the box, and it ran straight through the place no one had dared to look. Not the desert. Not back through the chariots. Down into the heart of the thing they feared most. The trap had three closed walls so that the fourth, impossible way would be the only way, and the people would have to walk it.