Parshat Beshalach5 min read

Israel Buried Its Dead in Egypt Before the Exodus Began

Rabbi Nehorai swears that most Israelites died during the plague of darkness, buried in secret while Egypt could not see, and freedom began in grief.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. Not Everyone Walked Out
  2. The Darkness Covered the Burial
  3. Freedom Began With Funerals
  4. The Desert of Shur Carried a Shadow
  5. The Prophet Waited in the Wilderness

Not Everyone Walked Out

Rabbi Nehorai swears it. Not one in five hundred went up from Egypt. Then he says the number is worse than that: not one in five thousand.

The familiar story of the Exodus is a story of a nation departing. The Mekhilta insists on telling a smaller, darker story first: a nation that buried most of itself before any departure was possible. The Torah says Israel went out in strength. The Mekhilta asks who was missing from that strength, and its answer is staggering.

The Darkness Covered the Burial

During the ninth plague, Egypt was blind. The darkness was thick enough to feel, the Torah says. No Egyptian could see another. No one rose from their place for three days. But Israel had light in their dwellings.

The Mekhilta uses that gap to tell a story the Torah does not say aloud. The light in Israel's homes was not only shelter from the plague. It was the light by which families buried their dead. While Egypt was frozen in its houses, unable to watch, unable to observe, unable to note the numbers and the grief, the Israelites were counting who would not leave.

They thanked God for one mercy: their enemies could not see them in their grief and rejoice over it. The burying happened in the darkness that protected them from Egyptian eyes, and that protection was itself understood as divine care in the midst of catastrophic loss.

Freedom Began With Funerals

The Mekhilta does not shy from the weight of this. The Exodus is celebrated as the birth of a nation. The Mekhilta preserves the memory that the birth was preceded by a mass death that the tradition mostly did not carry forward into its liturgy or its annual retelling at the seder table.

Why did so many die? The tradition offers its answer carefully. Those who refused to leave, those who had become too attached to Egypt, those who did not believe the redemption was real, were not able to benefit from it. Freedom is not carried on people against their will. Those who chose Egypt remained in Egypt, in the ground, and the living walked over that ground on their way out.

That is a hard teaching. But the Mekhilta does not hide it. It preserved the names of the rabbis who taught it and their specific claims about the proportions. Rabbi Nehorai swore. This was not speculation. This was tradition passed down and taken seriously enough to require an oath.

The Desert of Shur Carried a Shadow

After the sea, Israel went out to the desert of Shur. The Mekhilta reads that name: Shur, which can mean wall or fortification. Israel entering that desert carried the weight of what they had left behind in Egypt. The people who crossed the sea were not only the survivors of slavery. They were also the people who had buried their families during the plague of darkness and walked away from those graves without being able to come back.

The desert crossing is usually read as the beginning of something. The Mekhilta insists it was also the continuation of mourning. A people does not leave four hundred years and a mass burial without carrying something across the water with them.

The Prophet Waited in the Wilderness

There is a teaching connected to this tradition about a prophet who went out to the wilderness to be present to what Israel carried. Not to heal it immediately. Not to provide an explanation that made the loss acceptable. To be with the people in the place where they were, carrying what they were carrying.

The rabbis taught that righteous leadership begins in attention to suffering that no one else is watching. Moses turned aside at the burning bush because he could feel Israel's pain. The Exodus itself was preceded by a night of burials inside Egypt that Egypt did not see. The whole story of the redemption is framed by pain that is witnessed rather than ignored.

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From the tradition

Sources

3 sources

The texts this telling draws on, in full. Open a card to read inline, or expand it for a wider, quieter read.

Mekhilta Tractate Vayehi Beshalach 1:8Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael

The Mekhilta preserves a startling oath from Rabbi Nehorai, who declares that not one Israelite in five hundred actually left Egypt in the Exodus. His reasoning rests on two verses about Israel's explosive growth in bondage. The prophet recalls God's word to Jerusalem, "I made you as numerous as the plants of the field" (Ezekiel 16:7), and the Torah reports that "the children of Israel were fruitful, and teemed, and multiplied, and became exceedingly strong, and the land was filled with them" (Exodus 1:7). The piled-up verbs are read as describing miraculous fertility, with the tradition that an Israelite woman could bear six children at a single birth.

If the nation multiplied at that rate, then the six hundred thousand men who departed (Exodus 12:37) represent only a tiny remnant of the true population. Rabbi Nehorai pushes his own estimate further: not one in five hundred, perhaps not even one in five thousand went up, because so many Jews had already died in Egypt. When did this mass dying occur? During the three days of darkness, the plague of which it is written, "One man did not see another" (Exodus 10:23). The darkness, the sages teach, served a hidden mercy. Many Israelites who had refused to leave and were unworthy of redemption perished during those days, and the survivors buried their dead under the cover of that supernatural blackness. They gave thanks and praise to the Holy One, blessed be He, that their Egyptian foes could not see the burials and could not rejoice over Israel's downfall.

Full source
Mekhilta Tractate Vayassa 1:6Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael

(Exodus 15:22) "And they went out to the desert of Shur": This is the desert of Kazav. They said about the desert of Kazav that it was nine hundred parasangs by nine hundred parasangs, all full of serpents and scorpions, viz. (Devarim 8:15) "… who led you in the great, awesome desert of snake, fiery serpent, and scorpion, etc." And it is written (Isaiah 21:1) "A prophecy of the desert of the sea, etc.", and (Ibid. 30:6) "A prophecy of the beasts of the south in a land of affliction and oppression, lavi and layish (types of lions) among them, efeh and flying serpent, etc." "efeh" is a viper. It was said about this viper, that when it sees the shadow of a bird flying in the air and "links up" with its shadow, its limbs descend, in spite of which (Jeremiah 2:6) "they did not say 'Where is the L–rd who brought us up from the land of Egypt, who led us through the wilderness, a land of deserts and pits, a land of drought and tzalmaveth?'" What is "tzalmaveth"? "tzel" (a shadow) and (i.e., accompanied by) "maveth" (death).

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Mekhilta Tractate Amalek 4:28Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael

The Mekhilta of Rabbi Yishmael, in its tractate on Amalek, traces the honored lineage of a family of scribes back to the wilderness generation. Having noted that when a great master dies his wisdom departs with him, the midrash turns to a group who went and settled with a man named Yaavetz, of whom Scripture writes (I Chronicles 2:55), "the dwellers of Yaavetz."

The sages ask whether these were literally residents of a place called Yaavetz. They answer that the phrase means something deeper: they were the disciples of a teacher named Yaavetz, for the verse continues, "And the families of scribes, dwellers of Yaavetz: Tirathim, Shimathim, Suchathim. These were the Kenites who descended from Chamath, the father of the house of Rechav." The three strange family names are then read as descriptions of merit rather than mere genealogy.

"Tirathim" is linked to the root for sounding an alarm, mathri'im, teaching that they cried out in prayer and were answered. "Shimathim" is tied to hearing, shamu, teaching that they heard the sound of the shofar of Torah at Sinai and took it to heart. "Suchathim" is read as those who dwelt in succoth, in booths or tents, as confirmed by the Rechabites in (Jeremiah 35:10), "And we live in tents." Through this wordplay the Kenite scribes, descendants of the family of Rechav, are praised as people of prayer, of attentive obedience, and of disciplined simplicity, whose link to Torah began at Sinai itself.

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