Gabriel Walled the Water and the Sea Floor Bloomed Into Eden

The water stood open like a quarried canyon, two cliffs of sea holding their breath on either side of a path that should not exist. Israel stepped down onto the seabed, hundreds of thousands of them, with the dust of Egypt still on their sandals and the roar of Pharaoh's chariots gathering behind. The ground beneath them was not mud. It was dry. And it had never once seen the sun until this hour.

Then the water moved, and a figure came down with the people into the trench of the sea.

The Angel Who Went Down Into the Trench

Gabriel descended into the parted sea and walked among them. He did not lead from the front and he did not guard from the rear. He circled. He went around the whole moving nation and pressed himself against the standing water, so that the wall the verse calls a wall was not only sea. It was an angel, ringing the people, holding the flood at its edge with his own body.

The water wanted to fall. Anyone could feel it leaning. A wall of sea has no business standing upright, and this one strained at every moment to remember what water does. Gabriel set himself against that hunger and turned to the cliffs on every side, and he began to speak to them.

To the water on the right he called out a warning. "Take care with these," he said. "They are destined to receive the Torah from the right hand of the Holy One." The sea on the right held.

The Warnings Called Into the Walls

He turned to the left, where the water leaned closest. "Take care with these," he said. "They are destined to bind tefillin on the left arm." And the left-hand wall stiffened and did not move.

He looked forward, to the water that stood ahead of them like a gate the marchers had not yet reached. "Take care with these," he called into it. "They are destined to seal themselves before you in the covenant of the flesh." The forward wall waited.

Then he turned and shouted behind them, where the water rose at their backs and the chariots of Egypt were already plunging onto the path. "Take care with these," he warned. "They are destined to wear the knot of the tefillin behind the head, and the fringe of the corner behind them as they walk." The rear wall held its place a moment longer.

Four walls, and four warnings, each one naming a thing these terrified refugees did not yet possess. They had no Torah. They had no tefillin, no covenant of the kind he meant, no fringes, no knot. Gabriel was not describing them. He was describing what they would become, and he was making the sea responsible for keeping them alive long enough to become it. A people walking through a grave, and an angel telling the grave to behave because of mitzvot that lay generations in their future.

What Broke Open Beneath Their Feet

While Gabriel argued with the walls, something opened under the soles of the people.

The dry floor of the sea cracked, and water came up. Not the flood at their sides. Sweet water, clean water, sprang up out of the seabed in fountains, the kind a thirsty nation kneels to drink. Where the springs broke through, the ground answered them. Green came up out of a place that had never held a root. Verdure, the soft new green of first growth, spread across the bottom of the sea as though spring had been waiting all along beneath the waves for someone to walk there.

Then the trees. Fruit trees pushed up through the floor of the sea, rose to their full height between the walls of water, and hung heavy with ripe fruit. Israel walked through an orchard that had grown in the time it took to cross. They reached up and ate from branches that were standing on the ocean's bottom, between two cliffs of held-back flood, with an angel circling them and shouting at the water to remember its manners.

The Garden Walled by Terror

So this was the corridor of their escape. On the floor, fountains and grass and trees bowing with fruit. On every side, a wall of sea that wanted to fall and an angel holding it up by naming their future. Behind them, the chariots crowding down into the same trench, the horses screaming, Pharaoh's men driving deeper into the path the way a man drives into his own ruin.

The same verb the Torah uses for this walk, halakh, is the verb for walking in another garden, in the cool of an evening when the world was young. The people did not know that. They only knew the taste of unexpected fruit in their mouths and the green underfoot where there should have been drowning, and the voice of an angel ringing them like a second wall, calling out their destiny to the water so the water would let them live to keep it.

They crossed. They came up on the far shore with the green still bright behind them and the fountains still rising. And then the walls forgot the warnings, and the sea fell on everything left inside it, and the orchard and the chariots went down together into the closing dark.