The Idolatry That Crossed the Red Sea With Israel

Most people think the Red Sea washed Israel clean. The waters closed over Pharaoh, the new nation walked out the other side, and every trace of Egypt was left behind in the surf. It is one of the most stubborn misreadings of the Exodus story, and a second-century rabbi named Yehudah ben Ilai wanted it corrected.

According to the Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael, the tannaitic midrash on Exodus compiled in second-century Palestine out of the teachings of the school of Rabbi Ishmael, Rabbi Yehudah made an uncomfortable claim. Idolatry crossed the Red Sea with Israel. Not left behind. Not drowned with the Egyptian army. Carried across in the hands of the same people who had just watched the waters part.

The claim is almost too much to absorb 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 gods, Lord, were carrying little idols tucked under their cloaks. The Mekhilta's reading of Rabbi Yehudah does not soften this. It turns on a single verb in Exodus 15:22, where the Torah says Moses removed Israel from the Red Sea. The Hebrew verb vayasa can mean to cause someone to travel, but it can also be read as to strip something away. Rabbi Yehudah reads it the second way. Moses removed something from Israel at the Red Sea. And what he removed was the idolatry they had hauled across the water.

The Mekhilta then pulls a verse from one of the later prophets to confirm the reading. Zechariah, prophesying in Jerusalem in the late sixth century BCE, after the return from Babylonian exile, says, "And he shall pass through the sea of affliction, and shall smite the waves in the sea, and all the depths of the river shall dry up" (Zechariah 10:11). The Hebrew word the verse uses for "affliction" is tzarah, which can also mean a rival or an adversary. The rabbis read it as a code word for idolatry, the rival worship that was always competing with the covenant. And Zechariah says tzarah passed through the sea. The rival crossed. The adversary crossed. Idol worship crossed.

Then Moses had to pull it out.

To understand why the rabbis needed this reading, you have to look back at the four hundred years that came before. Abraham's descendants had lived in Egypt since the famine days of Joseph. According to the Torah's own chronology in (Exodus 12:40), they were in Egypt for four hundred and thirty years, most of them as slaves. Egypt was the most religious country in the ancient world. Every Egyptian street had a shrine. Every Egyptian household had household gods. Every trade had a patron deity. Every Nile flood had a myth attached to it. Israelite children grew up breathing that air for generations.

Ezekiel, prophesying in Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE, is shockingly direct about this. In Ezekiel 20:7-8, God reminds Israel through the prophet that when He first spoke to them in Egypt, He commanded them to throw away the "detestable things your eyes feast on and do not defile yourselves with the idols of Egypt. But they rebelled against Me and would not listen." In Ezekiel's reading, Israel in Egypt was not a suffering monotheistic remnant longing for a God their ancestors had known. Israel in Egypt was, at least in part, a population that had absorbed Egyptian religion and did not particularly want to give it up, even when God was standing in front of them offering freedom.

The plagues did not erase this. The ten plagues of Egypt were, as the rabbis of Bereshit Rabbah, compiled in fifth-century Palestine, taught repeatedly, judgments against the gods of Egypt. Each plague attacked a specific Egyptian deity. The Nile turning to blood was an attack on Hapi, the god of the river. The darkness was an attack on Ra, the sun god. But even when the Egyptian gods were exposed as powerless, the Israelites who had prayed to them for generations did not immediately abandon them. Habit is harder than theology.

And so, on the morning after the splitting of the sea, when a newly freed nation climbed out of the water with their bundles and their gold and their hope, some of those bundles contained little figurines. Small carved gods. Amulets. Scarab beetles. Incense jars. Private household idols that had been in the family for generations. The people had crossed. So had the idols.

Moses is the one who had to confront this. The Mekhilta's reading turns Moses from a prophet into a surgeon. He does not rebuke. He does not preach. He removes. The Hebrew verb, in Rabbi Yehudah's hands, becomes almost surgical in its precision. Moses goes through the camp and, one by one, strips the idolatry out of the hands of people who still thought they needed it. The Mekhilta does not describe this as a conflict. It describes it as a peeling, a quiet extraction, the way you would remove something that had been wrapped too tightly around a wound.

There is something devastating and also strangely compassionate in this teaching. The rabbis of the second century were not naive about faith. They knew that a single miracle, no matter how spectacular, does not uproot a lifetime of inherited religion. They had watched their own people survive the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE and the collapse of Jerusalem, and they knew that the people who came out of those catastrophes did not come out perfect. They carried their grief, their habits, their compromises with them into the next chapter. Louis Ginzberg, in his Legends of the Jews published in seven volumes between 1909 and 1938 in Philadelphia (see the full Ginzberg collection in our database), collected this tradition and noted that the rabbis wanted every reader to see themselves in the people crossing the Red Sea with contraband in their bags.

The deepest part of the Mekhilta's reading is this. The miracle does not finish the work. The miracle just makes the work possible. Israel crossed the sea. That was the beginning, not the end. The idolatry still had to be unlearned, the little gods still had to be taken out of their hands, and the forty years in the wilderness were, among many other things, the slow process of extracting Egypt out of the people the water had already set free.

The sea split. Israel walked through. And Egypt, invisible, walked with them.