Israel Was a Lily Surrounded by Thorns at the Red Sea

The angels of justice had a question at the Red Sea, and it was a fair one. Why these people?

Vayikra Rabbah, the fifth-century Midrash on Leviticus preserved in the Midrash Rabbah collection, preserves a tradition from Rabbi Elazar that most readers prefer to move past quickly. The Israelites in Egypt, he says plainly, were not morally distinct from their oppressors. Both groups were uncircumcised in the deepest sense. Both wore the mixed fibers that Torah would later forbid. Both had absorbed the surrounding culture so completely that a neutral observer looking at the sea from above would not have seen a clear moral difference between the nation being saved and the army being drowned.

Rabbi Elazar’s image for this moment comes from the Song of Songs: a lily growing in a thicket of thorns. Beautiful, yes. But to reach it, you had to push through everything around it, and the thorns were not clearly distinguishable from the flower until you looked very carefully. The rescue of Israel from Egypt was, in this sense, plucking a lily from thorns with great difficulty. The difficulty was not physical. It was moral. The attribute of strict divine justice asked why this nation merited rescue when its record looked so similar to everyone else’s.

So what tipped the balance? Why did God split the sea for people who, by any neutral measure, had not earned it?

Rabbi Shmuel bar Nahmani has the answer, and it is blunt: God had made an oath. (Exodus 6:6) records God’s promise to Abraham’s descendants: “I will take you out... I will rescue you... I will redeem you.” The word Rabbi Shmuel focuses on is lakhen, “therefore,” which he reads as the language of oath-taking, pointing to (I Samuel 3:14) as a parallel: “Therefore, I have taken an oath to the house of Eli.” God had bound Himself. Had He not, the attribute of divine justice would have left Israel in Egypt permanently. Not because God was indifferent, but because the case for rescue had not been made on the merits.

Rabbi Berekhya adds something almost shocking in its directness: God, in a sense, overruled His own justice to keep the promise. “With Your arm, You redeemed Your people” (Psalms 77:16). With force. With an act of will that pushed past what the evidence supported. The arm that split the sea was not responding to Israel’s righteousness. It was responding to a commitment made to Abraham centuries before any of the Israelites standing on the shore were born.

Then Rabbi Yudan counts letters, and the counting reveals something deeper than arithmetic.

From the phrase “to come and take for himself a nation from the midst of a nation” to the phrase “with fearsome deeds” in (Deuteronomy 4:34), there are seventy-two letters. Rabbi Avin says this is not coincidence: God redeemed Israel through the Divine Name, because that Name is also seventy-two letters. The redemption was not an act of administration or policy or even mercy in the ordinary sense. It was personal. It carried the full weight of who God is, the Name that cannot be spoken in full, the presence behind every promise ever made to the ancestors.

What Vayikra Rabbah is doing here is honest in a way that is easy to miss. It does not pretend the Israelites were righteous. It does not argue that they suffered enough to deserve rescue or that their faith was sufficient to earn it. The Midrash lets the prosecution’s case stand. From a standpoint of pure justice, there was no reason to save them. And then it says: God saved them anyway. Because of the promise. Because of the oath. Because the covenant is not a reward structure but a commitment that predates the behavior it responds to.

This is the Exodus the rabbis believed in. Not a vindication of the worthy, but a rescue of the unworthy because God had made Himself responsible for them long before they had a chance to be worthy or unworthy of anything. The lily among thorns does not earn its beauty. It is simply what it is. And the gardener who promised to tend it does not check whether it has improved before reaching through the thorns to pull it free.

The angels of justice watched the sea split. There was nothing left to say. The promise had already been made, the Name had already been spoken, and the arm that parted the water was not responding to a case argued in the court. It was honoring a word given before the court existed.

The image of the lily among thorns is drawn from Song of Songs 2:2: “Like a lily among the thorns, so is my beloved among the daughters.” In its original context, it is a love poem, a declaration of beauty singled out from everything around it. The rabbis read it as a description of the Exodus: Israel as the beloved, Egypt as the thorns, the divine lover reaching in to claim what was always his. The image is not flattering to Israel, exactly. The lily does not distinguish itself from the thorns by its own effort. It is simply a different kind of thing, claimed by a different kind of care.

What the Midrash of Vayikra Rabbah is ultimately teaching is a theology without self-congratulation. Israel was not saved because Israel was better. Israel was saved because God had made a promise and was not willing to break it. That is harder to sit with than a story of earned redemption. It asks the reader to accept that the relationship between God and Israel is not primarily a transaction but a commitment, and that commitments made to the ancestors reach forward through generations regardless of what those generations do with the inheritance they receive.