Parshat Beshalach5 min read

Pharaoh's Chariots Rose and Fell Inside the Sea

Two words in the Song at the Sea fight each other. One says God hurled the chariots down. The other says He lifted them. Both are right, in that order.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. He Asked Who the Lord Was
  2. The Song Uses Two Words That Cannot Both Be True
  3. What a Warrior Does When the Blood Is Up
  4. They Could Not Agree on Whether Pharaoh Died
  5. Nothing Was Left on the Water
Pharaoh's Chariots Rose and Fell Inside the Sea Click for full size

He Asked Who the Lord Was

Two shepherds stood in the throne room in Egypt and asked for three days in the desert, and Pharaoh gave them the answer that decided everything after it.

"Who is the Lord, that I should listen to His voice and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord."

He said it in front of his court and went back to work. The order that day was that the slaves would gather their own straw and the brick count would not drop. He had weighed the voice, found it weighed nothing, and got on with the afternoon.

By the measure a man measures out, it is measured back to him. That is not a proverb about fairness. It is a rule about shape. Whatever a man does gets handed to him again in the same form, and the form Pharaoh chose was weightlessness.

The Song Uses Two Words That Cannot Both Be True

When Israel stood on the far bank and sang, they sang two verbs about the same army and the verbs pull in opposite directions.

One of them, yarah, means He cast them down into the sea. Thrown, dropped, sunk. The other, ramah, means He raised them into the sea. Lifted. Sent up.

They cannot both describe a drowning. So they are not describing a drowning.

The horses went up first with the traces still buckled to them and the shafts swinging, up over the wall of standing water, and the chariots came up behind them, and the picked officers of Egypt went up out of the surface with nothing under their boots. Then the water took the whole load and drove it down to the floor of the sea. Then it brought them up again. Yarah is how they fell to the floor of the deep. Ramah is how they rose again to the heights. Over and over, until the sea was finished with them.

Egypt's speed, its rank, its six hundred chosen vehicles and the finest men in them, spent their last minutes going up and down like something a child had thrown.

What a Warrior Does When the Blood Is Up

There is a fighting man in a province somewhere who has gone all the way into it.

His rage and his strength have closed over his eyes and he cannot sort one body from another any more. He comes back through his own street with the sword still moving and cuts down his father, and his mother, and whoever of his own blood is standing in the doorway, and afterward he will not be able to say why. That is what happens to power when it is running at full force inside a man.

Not so the Holy One.

The song says the Lord is a man of war, and He was. He fought Egypt at the water and did not hold anything back. And in the same line it says the Lord is His name, and that name is the one He speaks over Himself when He passes by in the cloud: the Lord, the Lord, merciful and gracious. He was at full force against the army in front of Him and had not lost His hold on anything behind Him. The same hour, the same hand.

They Could Not Agree on Whether Pharaoh Died

The verse says the waters came back and covered the chariots and the horsemen, all the army of Pharaoh that had gone into the sea after them, not one of them remained.

Rabbi Yehudah read it flat. Every chariot means every chariot, and that includes the one with the king in it. Pharaoh went under with his men and the sea kept him.

Rabbi Nechemiah refused. All of them except that one, he said, and he had a line to stand on: God had told Pharaoh in Egypt, in the middle of the plagues, that He had kept him standing on purpose, for this very reason, so that His name would be told through all the earth. A man preserved for that is not drowned in a crowd.

Others took a third road, and theirs is the coldest of the three. Pharaoh went down last. The whole force went in ahead of him and he watched every rank of it disappear, and then the horses and the chariots and the riders came into the sea and the Lord turned the waters back over them, and he went too.

Nothing Was Left on the Water

By morning the sea lay flat and there was nothing standing on it.

Israel came down to the edge and saw Egypt on the shore, laid out along the sand where the water had put them, the chariots and the harness and the men who had been shouting behind them the day before. The most feared army on the road from the delta to Canaan, delivered back to the beach like driftwood, by a voice its king had said he did not know.

PharaohRed SeaDivine JusticeExodusMekhilta
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From the tradition

Sources

3 sources

The texts behind this telling. Some cards carry a translation of the source; others are our own retelling of it, and each card says which. Every card links out to the original.

Mekhilta Tractate Shirah 4:14Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.Mechilta, translated by Rabbi Shraga Silverstein · CC-BY

(Exodus 15:4) "the chariots of Pharaoh and his host." The Mekhilta draws from this line the principle the sages return to again and again: "As one measures, so is it meted out to him." Punishment in the Torah is not arbitrary but answers, measure for measure, to the offense. The Egyptians had set themselves against the rule of Heaven with the very words of their king, who said (Ibid. 5:2) "Who is the L-rd that I should hearken to his voice?" Pharaoh denied that the L-rd held any sway over him, and so the L-rd answered him through the instruments of his own pride. And You meted it out to him accordingly, namely, "The chariots of Pharaoh and his host" were cast into the sea, the same chariots in which he trusted becoming the means of his ruin. The sages then notice a difficulty in the wording. One verse here states "yarah," He cast them down into the sea, while another (Ibid. 1) states "ramah," He lifted them into the sea. How are these two verses to be reconciled? The Mekhilta resolves it with a single image of the drowning host: "Yarah," they descended to the depths, and "ramah," they rose to the heights. The waters first hurled the Egyptians upward and then plunged them down, so that both words describe one death, the chariots tossed high upon the waves before they sank to the bottom of the sea.

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Mekhilta Tractate Shirah 4:8Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.Mechilta, translated by Rabbi Shraga Silverstein · CC-BY

The Mekhilta presents yet another parable about human warriors, this time addressing the most dangerous flaw of all: uncontrolled rage. A warrior in a province, it says, may become so swayed by wrath and power that he vents his fury even upon his own father and mother and closest relatives. In the heat of battle, the human fighter loses all discrimination. Friend and foe blur together. The rage that makes him deadly on the battlefield makes him deadly to everyone around him.

Not so the Holy One Blessed be He. The verse says: "The Lord is a man of war, the Lord is His name." The Mekhilta reads this as two statements joined together. "The Lord is a man of war". He fought against the Egyptians with devastating force. But "the Lord is His name", the divine name (yod-keh-vav-keh) signifies mercy. The same God who destroyed Pharaoh's army simultaneously extended compassion to His own creations.

The proof text is extraordinary: "The Lord, the Lord, the God who is merciful and gracious" (Exodus 34:6). This is the verse revealed to Moses as the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy. And the Mekhilta places it in direct relationship with God's warrior nature.

A human warrior at war cannot also be merciful. The two states are incompatible in a mortal mind. But God fights and shows mercy at the same moment. He destroys the wicked and compassionates His creations in a single breath. This is what it means to be a divine warrior, power without the loss of love, justice without the corruption of rage.

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Mekhilta Tractate Vayehi Beshalach 7:6Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.Mechilta, translated by Rabbi Shraga Silverstein · CC-BY

The Mekhilta records a three-way dispute over the fate of Pharaoh himself at the splitting of the sea. Scripture says (Exodus 14:28) "And the waters returned and covered the chariot," and the rabbis ask whether Pharaoh drowned with his army or was spared. The answer hinges on which verses one weighs most heavily, and each opinion anchors itself in a specific line of the song at the sea.

R. Yehudah holds that even Pharaoh's own chariot was covered by the returning waters, so the king perished with his host. He reads the words "covered the chariot" inclusively and supports it from (Exodus 15:4), "the chariots of Pharaoh and his host," which names Pharaoh's chariot among those drowned. On this view no one of the Egyptian force survived.

R. Nechemiah disagrees and says all drowned except Pharaoh. He cites the warning given to Pharaoh in Egypt (Exodus 9:16), "But, because of this I have preserved you," understanding that the L-rd kept Pharaoh alive to go on declaring the divine might. A third group, "Others," offers a middle reading: Pharaoh went down into the sea last of all and only then drowned, as it says (Exodus 15:19) "For the horse of Pharaoh came with its chariot and its riders into the sea, and the L-rd turned back upon them the waters of the sea." By this account Pharaoh witnessed the destruction of his army before he too was swallowed by the returning waters.

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