Israel Watched Egypt's Angel Fall Before the Sea Took Him

The wall of water stood on either side of them, and Israel did not look down at the dry sea floor or back at the chariots. They looked up. High above the towers of foam, in the place where the host of heaven keeps its stations, something tall and bright was falling.

It was the heavenly prince of Egypt. For four hundred years he had stood in his place on high, the patron of the kingdom that had broken Israel's backs in clay and brick. Now he came loose from his station like a star torn from its socket, and Israel, ankle-deep between two cliffs of held water, began to sing before the water moved at all.

The Angel Came Loose From His Station

They understood what they were seeing. The Holy One does not collect a debt from a kingdom until He has first collected it from the kingdom's prince above. He strikes the host of the height in the height, and only afterward the kings of the earth below. So the prophets had said it would go. The shining one, son of dawn, is cut down from heaven first, and only then laid low among the nations. The sword is sated in the sky before it ever comes down upon Edom.

So the order of the morning was not what the Egyptians thought. To them, a wind had stalled their wheels and a wall of water hung over their heads. They did not know that the verdict had already been handed down in a court they could not see, that their prince had already been thrown, that the man and the horse in the sea were only the echo of a fall that had happened higher up.

Israel saw the prince thrown, and the song rose in their throats. Only after that did the waters remember they were waters.

The Astrologers Who Would Not Concede

To understand how Egypt arrived at this morning, go back to the first plague, to the day the river turned to blood and the kingdom learned nothing.

The Nile had thickened and gone red from bank to bank. Fish rolled belly-up in the shallows. People dug along the water's edge for something clean to drink and came up with mud and blood. And the God of Israel, in striking the river, had drawn a line. He had spared one district. The water of Goshen, where the slaves lived, still ran clear.

Egypt's astrologers stood before that one clean stream, and they refused to be beaten. They could not heal the river. They could not pull a single cup of sweet water for their own dying people. So they did the one thing left to them. By their burnings and their incantations they went down to Goshen, the slaves' quarter, the last untouched water in the land, and they turned it to blood as well.

It was their proof. See, they said, we can do it too. But what they had actually done was reach past their own gasping nation to foul the cup of the people Egypt was already crushing. They could not lift the plague. They could only spread it onto the weak. A kingdom in its death throes had found the limit of its power, and the limit was this: it could still wound the slave it had always wounded, and nothing more.

Pharaoh's Heart Was Fortified, Not Merely Hardened

And Pharaoh watched the trick and was satisfied. His heart did not simply harden in him. It was made strong, fortified like a wall braced against a flood, a thing built up by his own will. He looked at the reddened water of the slaves and chose to call it a draw.

That choice would cost him nine more plagues. Frogs in his bed. Lice in his beard. Darkness so thick a man could not see his own hand or rise from his place for three days. His firstborn cold in the night, and every firstborn of Egypt with him, until the cry went up from the great house to the house of the captive in the dungeon.

Through all of it the wall of his heart held, fortified, fortified, fortified, until the night he finally let them go and then, regretting it before dawn, harnessed his chariot to chase them down to the edge of the sea.

The Sea Remembered It Was Water

Now the chariots were in the corridor between the walls, and the prince of Egypt was already down, and Israel was already singing.

The wheels began to drag in the wet sand. The horses screamed and would not run. And in the time to come, the tradition says, the Holy One will stand the horse itself in judgment and ask it, "Why did you run after My children?" And the horse will answer, "The Egyptian forced me to run against my will." The beast will go free. The driver who fortified his own heart will not have that excuse to offer.

Then the walls forgot they were walls. The held water remembered the pull of its own weight and came down all at once, the whole roaring mass of it, horse and rider and the fine bright armor, folded into the sea in a single breath.

On the far shore Israel stood dry, the song still in their mouths, watching the surface go flat. They had seen the ending before it happened. They had watched the prince of Egypt cast down from the height while the chariots were still dry behind them, and they had known, while the water still stood like a wall, that the kingdom was already a dead thing waiting to be told.