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Why Egypt Turned Back and Left Judah to Burn

Pharaoh's fleet was sailing north to break the siege. Then God filled the water with drowned Egyptian ancestors, and the fleet turned back.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. The Fleet on the Water
  2. The Dead Return to the Water
  3. What Jeremiah Had Understood
  4. What the Rescue's Failure Meant for Jerusalem

The Fleet on the Water

The ships had already left Egypt. Pharaoh Necho's warships were cutting north through the Mediterranean, sailing toward Judah to break the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem. From the walls of the city, people were watching the horizon with the particular desperate hope of people who have run out of options. Egypt was coming. The alliance was going to hold. Jeremiah was going to be wrong.

Jeremiah had been saying it for years, in the Temple courts, before the royal council, to anyone who would listen: Egyptian power was an illusion, a staff of reed that would pierce the hand of anyone who leaned on it. Make peace with Nebuchadnezzar. The Babylonian is not your enemy; he is the instrument of a judgment you can still moderate. For this, the court had thrown him in prison. The people had turned from him in fury. Now the Egyptian fleet was on the water, and everyone believed he was wrong.

Then the sea filled with bodies.

The Dead Return to the Water

God commanded the waters to be covered with corpses. Not the newly dead from some recent battle. Not shipwrecked soldiers. These were old bones, dredged up and brought to the surface, the drowned dead from a catastrophe the Egyptians knew too well. The sailors recognized them. Ancestors. The men who had ridden chariots into the parted sea and been swallowed when the waters collapsed.

A question passed through the fleet like wind: where are we sailing? The answer arrived quickly. North. Toward the country of the Hebrews. Toward the descendants of the same people who had led them into this water before. The memory was not abstract. It was there in the waves around the hull, looking up at them.

The fleet turned around.

What Jeremiah Had Understood

This was what Jeremiah had known. Not the specific mechanism of God filling the sea with bones, but the principle underneath it: Egyptian military power was real, but it was not the kind of power that could stand against what was being moved in Babylon. The two forces were not equivalent. One was an empire with chariots and ships. The other was something older and more persistent than empires, and it had already demonstrated, in an episode burned into the collective memory of every Egyptian alive, exactly how it treated armies that came between it and the Hebrew people's appointed fate.

The Egyptians had been at the sea before. They had not chosen to go in. They had followed the Hebrews in, and the sea had closed on them, and that was the end of Pharaoh's army. The descendants of those sailors, looking down at the floating dead, made the calculation their ancestors had failed to make in time, and they turned south toward home.

What the Rescue's Failure Meant for Jerusalem

When news reached Jerusalem that the Egyptian fleet had turned back, the people on the walls understood what it meant. There was no second alliance coming. There were no other ships. The Babylonian siege would continue, and the city would fall, and the prophet who had been imprisoned for saying so was still sitting in his cell under the palace, and he had been right all along.

Nebuchadnezzar completed the siege. The Temple burned in the summer. The people went into exile in chains along the road to Babylon. And Jeremiah, who had not wanted to be right about any of it, sat in the ruins and wrote the book that begins with the word Eichah: How.

How has the city that was full of people become lonely. How has she become like a widow. How has she who was great among nations become a tributary.

He had known the answer to every question the word implied. He had not wanted to know it.

JeremiahEgyptExileProphecyMiracles
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From the tradition

Sources

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

Legends of the Jews 10:13Legends of the Jews

That’s kind of what it was like for the prophet Jeremiah during the reign of King Zedekiah. According to Legends of the Jews, he was facing opposition from pretty much everyone. – the people, the royal court…even some of the high priests! Ginzberg, drawing on a wealth of sources, paints a picture of a society in deep spiritual crisis. He even mentions that these priests weren't even following the basic commandment of circumcision!

Jeremiah was stirring up trouble because he was against an alliance with Egypt against Babylonia. He felt the right move was to make peace with Nebuchadnezzar. Now, The first reading, siding with Egypt seemed like the smart play. They looked like they could offer some real muscle against the Babylonians.

In fact, Pharaoh Necho’s army actually set sail from Egypt to help the Jews. But then, a strange thing happened.

God, seeing this, commanded the seas to be covered in corpses. Imagine the scene! The Egyptians, sailing along, suddenly confronted by this macabre sight. "Where did all these bodies come from?" they wondered.

Then, the realization dawned. These were the bodies of their ancestors, drowned in the Red Sea because of the Israelites’ liberation from Egyptian slavery! “What?” they exclaimed. “Shall we help the descendants of those who drowned our fathers?” It just didn’t sit right.

And so, they turned their ships around and sailed back to Egypt. Just as Jeremiah had warned, Egyptian promises turned out to be worthless.

It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? How often do we ignore the wisdom of those who see the bigger picture, blinded by short-term gains or fleeting alliances? And how often does history – even ancient history, perhaps especially ancient history – have a way of repeating itself? Maybe the story of Jeremiah isn’t just a tale from the past, but a lesson for us today.

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Shemot Rabbah 23:8Shemot Rabbah

Our story comes from Shemot Rabbah, a collection of rabbinic interpretations on the Book of Exodus. It paints a breathtaking picture of divine intervention and the unwavering faith of a new generation. Rabbi Yehuda tells us it was the children, the very ones Pharaoh sought to destroy, who first recognized God at the Red Sea. But how?

The midrash (rabbinic interpretive commentary), or interpretive story, recounts a remarkable tale. Imagine an Israelite woman, forced to give birth in the fields, away from the safety of her home. Overwhelmed but resolute, she would leave her newborn in God's care, entrusting the child's fate to the Divine. "Master of the universe," she would pray, "I did mine; You do Yours."

Rabbi Yochanan says that God Himself, in a manner of speaking, would descend. He would sever the umbilical cord, cleanse the child, and anoint them with oil. We find echoes of this in the prophet Ezekiel (16:4-5, 9-10), who speaks of a neglected newborn, abandoned and unwashed. "Regarding your birth," Ezekiel says, "on the day you were born, your navel was not cut. I bathed you in water. I clothed you in embroidery." These verses, according to the midrash, hint at God's direct involvement in nurturing these abandoned children.

Can you picture it? Two stone vessels placed in the infant's hands – one filled with oil, the other with milk. Deuteronomy (32:13) alludes to this, saying, "He gave him to suckle honey from a stone, and oil from a flinty rock." The children grew strong and healthy in the fields, nurtured by divine providence. "I caused you to grow like the growth of the field," says Ezekiel (16:7).

When these children finally entered their parents' homes, they were asked, "Who tended to you?" And their reply was consistent: "A certain handsome, outstanding young man would descend and provide all our needs." This figure, the midrash suggests, was none other than God Himself, described in the Song of Songs (5:10) as "clear-skinned and ruddy, more eminent than ten thousand."

Now, imagine the scene at the Red Sea. The Israelites are trapped, Pharaoh's army closing in. Fear and desperation fill the air. But then, these children, the ones nurtured by God in the fields, recognize Him. As the Shemot Rabbah tells us, they cried out to their parents, "This is the One who was doing all those things for us when we were in Egypt!" And in that moment of recognition, their faith ignited, and they proclaimed, "This is my God, and I will glorify Him!" (Exodus 15:2). The phrase "this is my God" is taken to mean that they recognized Him.

This midrash is more than just a beautiful story. It's a evidence of the enduring power of faith, even in the face of unimaginable adversity. It reminds us that even when we feel abandoned and alone, God is always present, nurturing us, and guiding us towards redemption. And sometimes, it's the most vulnerable among us, the children, who show us the way. What does it mean to recognize God in our lives? Where do we see the Divine hand at work? Perhaps, like those children at the Red Sea, we simply need to open our eyes and hearts to the miracles unfolding around us every day.

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