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The Idolatry That Crossed the Red Sea With Israel

Most people think the Red Sea left Egypt behind. A second-century rabbi says Israel carried something through the water Moses had to strip away.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. The Verb That Means to Strip Something Away
  2. After the Song
  3. The Power of Sihon and Og
  4. What the Crossing Actually Proved

The waters closed over Pharaoh. The new nation walked out the other side. Every trace of Egypt was left behind in the surf.

That is the version most readers carry of the Exodus. A second-century rabbi named Yehudah ben Ilai wanted it corrected.

The Verb That Means to Strip Something Away

The Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael, the tannaitic midrash on Exodus compiled in second-century Palestine from the school of Rabbi Ishmael, preserved Rabbi Yehudah's uncomfortable reading of a single verb. The Torah says, in Exodus 15:22, that Moses removed Israel from the Red Sea. The Hebrew verb used is vayasa. It can mean to cause someone to travel. But it can also be read as to strip something away from someone. Rabbi Yehudah reads it the second way.

Moses removed something from Israel at the Red Sea. Not Israel from the sea. Something from Israel. And what he removed was the idolatry they had hauled across the water.

Not left behind. Not drowned with the Egyptian army. Carried across by the same people who had just watched the waters part.

After the Song

The claim is almost too much on first reading. These are the people who had just sung the Song of the Sea. The same mouths that shouted Mi khamokha ba'elim, Hashem, who is like You among the divine powers, Lord (Exodus 15:11), were carrying little idols tucked under their cloaks on the far shore. The singing was genuine. The clinging was also genuine. Both things were happening in the same people at the same moment.

The prophet Zechariah provides the confirmation Rabbi Yehudah uses (Zechariah 10:11): And tzarah passed through the Red Sea. The word tzarah means affliction or trouble. Rabbi Yehudah reads it as referring to the distress of idolatry, the spiritual condition that had been Israel's companion through all the years of Egypt. Zechariah, writing centuries after the Exodus, confirms that the thing which passed through the sea was still being carried. It did not stay in Egypt. It went with the people because people carry what has shaped them, even through miracles.

The Power of Sihon and Og

The Legends of the Jews, Louis Ginzberg's synthesis of rabbinic tradition, offers a parallel that clarifies what was carried through the water. The battles Israel fought against Sihon and Og, the kings of the Amorites on the far side of the Jordan, loomed so large in the rabbinic imagination that some sages equated them with the triumph at the Red Sea. David composed songs of gratitude for those specific victories, retroactively acknowledging what had happened generations before his birth. The battles mattered because what Israel carried out of Egypt, the idolatry it had not fully shed at the sea, had shaped the character of the peoples it now had to fight.

The crossing did not cure. It created a condition under which the cure was possible. Moses stripped the idolatry on the far shore, but he did not perform a full removal. The pull of what had been formed in Egypt across four hundred years did not dissolve in seawater. It followed the people into the desert, into the golden calf disaster, into the repeated complaints and reversals of the wilderness generation. Rabbi Yehudah is not making an accusation. He is making an observation about how formation works and how long it takes to undo.

What the Crossing Actually Proved

The miracle was real. The walls of water were real. The drowning of Pharaoh's cavalry was real. Rabbi Yehudah does not dispute any of it. What he disputes is the idea that a miracle automatically produces transformation. Israel saw the most spectacular act of divine intervention in their collective history, sang about it the morning after, and was still carrying Egyptian religious habits in their hands when they started walking into the desert. The miracle had changed their geography. It had not yet changed their interiority.

That is the work Moses was beginning when he used the verb the Mekhilta noticed. He was not simply moving people from one place to another. He was removing something from them, an extraction that would take the whole forty years of the wilderness to complete, and would not be fully accomplished even then. The Torah knows this. The prophet Ezekiel knew it. Zechariah knew it. Rabbi Yehudah is simply unwilling to let the moment of the crossing be read as a clean break when it was not.

MosesExodusMekhiltaRed SeaIdolatryZechariahEgypt
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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.

Mekhilta Tractate Vayassa 1:5Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael

Rabbi Yehudah ben Ilai makes a disturbing claim in the Mekhilta: idolatry crossed the Red Sea with Israel. The very nation that had just witnessed God's greatest miracle, the splitting of the sea, the destruction of Egypt's army, carried idol worship through the waters alongside them.

The proof lies in a creative reading of the verse. "And Moses removed Israel from the Red Sea" can also be read as "And Moses removed from Israel the thing of the Red Sea." What was this "thing"? It was idolatry, the Egyptian religious practices and objects that some Israelites had clung to even through the plagues, even through the Exodus, even through the parting of the waters.

Zechariah provides the prophetic confirmation (Zechariah 10:11): "And tzarah passed through the Red Sea." The word tzarah literally means "rival" or "adversary," and the rabbis identified it as a code word for idolatry, the rival to God's worship, the adversary of true faith.

This is a sobering teaching. The Red Sea did not purify Israel of their Egyptian influences. The miracle of the crossing did not automatically erase generations of living among idol-worshippers. Moses had to actively remove the idolatry after the crossing. Faith is not something that happens to you because you witness a miracle. It is something that must be deliberately chosen, and the old attachments must be deliberately stripped away, even on the far shore of the greatest wonder in history.

Full source
Legends of the Jews 5:108Legends of the Jews

In Jewish tradition, the battles against Sihon and Og, the kings of the Amorites, loom incredibly large. The sages even equated these triumphs to the monumental victory over Pharaoh at the Red Sea!

In Legends of the Jews, these weren't just minor skirmishes. They were huge. Some say they were as important as Joshua's later conquest of thirty-one kings! Ginzberg, drawing from various Midrashic (rabbinic interpretive commentary) sources, explains that Israel should have sung songs of praise then, just like they did after escaping Pharaoh. It was that significant.

In a way, they did. David, much later, composed songs of gratitude for God’s help in those very victories against Sihon and Og. It's as if David was retroactively acknowledging the incredible importance of what had occurred generations before.

How did these victories actually happen? Was it all just mighty warriors clashing steel? Well, yes, in part. But Jewish tradition often layers the physical with the miraculous, the seen with the unseen. In this case, it wasn’t just swords and shields. God sent… hornets.

Yes, you read that right. Hornets.

Now, we're not talking about your average buzzing nuisances. These were divinely appointed agents of destruction. Midrashic sources tell us that two hornets were sent after every Amorite warrior. One stung one eye, the other the other. And their venom wasn't just painful – it was lethal.

The Zohar, the foundational text of Jewish mysticism, adds another layer to the story. These hornets, it says, remained on the eastern side of the Jordan River. They didn’t physically cross over with the Israelites into Canaan. However, that didn't stop them from wreaking havoc on the Canaanites on the western side.

How, you ask? Well, these hornets would stand on the eastern bank and spit their venom across the river! Any Canaanite unfortunate enough to be struck by this airborne toxin would instantly go blind and become disarmed. An entire army, weakened and vulnerable, not by direct combat, but by… divine insect warfare.

What does it all mean? Perhaps it's a reminder that even the smallest of creatures can be instruments of immense power. Maybe it's about how divine intervention can work in mysterious, unexpected ways. Or maybe it's a reminder that even seemingly small victories can have ripple effects far beyond what we initially imagine. The venom of those hornets, after all, reached across a river and changed the course of history.

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