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, preserves a tradition from Rabbi Elazar that is uncomfortable enough to make most readers move past it 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 culture around them. If you were an angel of strict justice looking at the encamped Israelites on one side of the sea and the Egyptian army on the other, you would not have seen a clear moral difference.

Rabbi Elazar’s image for this moment is drawn 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.

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. God had bound Himself. Had He not, the attribute of divine justice would have left Israel in Egypt permanently.

Rabbi Berekhya adds something almost shocking: 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.

Then Rabbi Yudan counts letters.

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. It was personal. It carried the full weight of who God is.

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. 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.