When the Mountains Skipped Like Rams and the Sea Fled From Israel

The first thing that moved was the water. A man near the front of the column stopped walking, because the sea in front of him was not behaving like a sea. It was pulling back from his feet, sliding away across the wet sand as if something behind it had called its name. The salt smell went thin. Where there had been depth there was now a corridor of bare seabed, dark and dripping, walls of brine standing on either side without a hand to hold them.

Nobody had told the water to do this. The man looked down at his own feet, the feet of a freed slave, cracked and Egyptian dust still on them, and the great sea fled from him as though he were a king. The sea saw and fled (Psalms 114:3). It did not part politely. It ran.

The Sea Saw and Ran Backward

Behind the column the whips were gone. The brick pits were gone. The straw, the tally, the overseers counting out a day's quota, all of it lay behind in a country the people would never see again. They walked between the standing walls of water and the water held, because the One leading them was present in the corridor, and in the presence of that One the ordinary rules of the world lost their nerve.

An old woman among them remembered a name older than Egypt. Jacob. The house of Jacob, that was who walked here, the children of the man who had limped away from a night-long wrestling at the river and carried the limp to his grave. When Israel came out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of strange language (Psalms 114:1). No staff is named in that line. No plagues, no firstborn struck in the dark. Only a family, walking east, and a world rearranging itself to let the family pass.

The Jordan Turns Around in Its Bed

Later, years later, another river would do the same thing. The people had grown. The desert generation had been buried under the sand, and their children came down to the edge of the Jordan in flood, brown and fast and impassable. The river reached the feet of the ones carrying the holy chest and stopped. Then it went the wrong way. The Jordan turned backward (Psalms 114:3), the current bending against itself, water piling upstream in a heap while the riverbed lay open and the people crossed dry.

Twice now the waters had bent the knee. They saw who was coming and they refused to stand in the way of it. A child crossing the Jordan asked her mother why the river was running uphill, and the mother had no answer except that it had done this once before, at a sea, before she was born, and that the same Presence was passing now.

The Mountains Begin to Skip

It was not only the water. The man who led them, the one who would later set the whole thing into a song, looked up at the hills and saw the hills moving. The mountains skipped like rams (Psalms 114:4). Not a tremor. Not the slow grinding shift of a landslide. The mountains were leaping the way a ram leaps in a field in spring, all four feet off the ground, throwing its weight sideways for the pure animal pleasure of being alive and unowned.

The solid earth, the one fixed thing a person can stand on and trust, was dancing. Stone that had not moved since the third day of the world was kicking up its heels. He watched the ridgelines jump against the sky and he understood that he was not the only one celebrating. Creation itself had been holding its breath while the family was in chains, and now creation let the breath go, and the going-out of that breath shook the hills.

Why the Solid Earth Could Not Hold Still

The reason was joy, and the joy was not the people's alone. The hills and the deeps and the rivers had watched a family of slaves dragged into a brickyard and held there for generations, and the world had borne the wrongness of it the way a body bears an untreated wound. When the wound was finally cleaned, when the house of Jacob came up out of the strange-tongued land and turned its face toward the mountain in the wilderness where it would meet its God, the relief was too large for the geography to contain. So the geography moved. The mountains went up like rams and the little hills like lambs, and the man set it all down later in eight short lines so that the children would sing it and know that the ground beneath them had once danced for their sake.

The Same Mountains Quaked Over Jerusalem

The earth keeps a long memory, and it can grieve as hard as it once rejoiced. Centuries on, a prophet stood in the days before the city fell and looked out at the very same kind of hills. They were not skipping. I look at the mountains, they are quaking (Jeremiah 4:24). The same stone that had leaped like a ram when the family came out of bondage now shuddered under the weight of judgment coming down on the family's own city, trembling in dread instead of gladness.

The waters answered the same way. At the sea they had fled to open a road home. By the canals of the conqueror's land, when the people were marched out of Jerusalem in chains again, the waters only sat there while the people wept beside them. By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept (Psalms 137:1). One world, the same created world, dancing at the redemption and convulsing at the exile, as if it could not tell which it felt more.