The Jewels on the Shore and the Woe Egypt Cried

Click for full size

What the Tide Kept Giving Back

When Pharaoh rode out to recapture Israel, he did not ride to a battle. He rode to a parade. The Torah says he took six hundred chosen chariots, and the rabbinic tradition preserved in Midrash Tanchuma Buber gives the detail that turned the pursuit into a spectacle of human pride at its most extravagant. He bedecked the horses of those chariots with precious stones and pearls. He harnessed his whole treasury to the chase, because a king who pursues runaway slaves does not look like he might lose.

Then the water came down on him. The sea swallowed the king, his chosen chariots, his horses, and all the gems he had used to dress them for what was supposed to be a triumph. The sea kept none of it.

Day after day the tide cast those jewels back onto the shore. Stones still cold from the deep scattered across the wet sand each morning, and Israel came down to gather them. They filled their hands. The next dawn brought more. Why march into a wilderness when the sea itself was running tribute up to your feet every sunrise?

Why Moses Had to Drag Them Away

The answer to that question was Moses. He had to physically pull the people away from the shore. The rabbis behind Midrash Tanchuma Buber, the Buber recension of the Palestinian aggadic collection assembled across the early medieval centuries, read the urgency in Moses' behavior as something more than camp discipline. He understood what the treasure was doing to the people.

They had been slaves four hundred years. They had built cities for someone else, harvested grain for someone else, raised children who could be drowned at a king's whim. Now the sea was paying them in gems and they could not stop gathering. The abundance was real and the trauma was real and the combination was making them rooted to a shore that had nothing for them except more of what they were already holding.

Moses told them: God did not bring us out of Egypt to camp on the beach collecting royal jewelry. The reason God led you away from the settled land and into the desert is precisely the desert. You cannot be formed into a people while you are still within sight of the water that drowned your masters. Move. The gems will not follow you. What follows you is the God who parted the water, and He is going somewhere.

What Egypt Called Out After Them

While Israel walked away from the shore, Egypt was doing its own accounting. Midrash Tanchuma Buber preserves two separate traditions about the cry that went up from Egypt when the news arrived, and they belong together.

The Egyptians had known what was coming when Pharaoh announced he was pursuing the Israelites. His own people cried out to him: let them go. They had watched the ten plagues dismantle the country plague by plague for months. They had given Israel their gold and silver willingly at the border because they wanted them gone and were afraid of what more refusal would cost. When Pharaoh overrode all of that and rode to the sea anyway, Egypt cried the same word that Israel had been crying for four hundred years. Woe.

The second tradition about the word concerns Pharaoh himself. When he finally agreed, before the pursuit, to release the Israelites, he cried woe too. The rabbis asked why a man who was getting what he wanted, the removal of a people whose presence had brought plague after plague onto his kingdom, would cry out in grief. The answer was economic. The Israelites were not just slaves. They were the entire infrastructure of Egypt's building economy. They cut the stones and set the mortar and laid the brick and did every skilled and unskilled task in the construction of the kingdom's monuments. When they walked out, they took four hundred years of accumulated labor value with them, and the king who had spent a generation trying to reduce them to zero was left with the buildings they had built and no one who knew how to maintain them.

The Sea That Would Not Stay Still

Midrash Tanchuma Buber ends its account of the jewels on the shore with a detail that does not appear anywhere in the plain text of Exodus. After Moses had forced the people away from the beach and into the wilderness, the sea kept doing what it had been doing. It kept returning jewels to the shore. There was no one to collect them anymore. The gems washed up and back and up again on an empty beach, because the sea that had drowned a king's treasury was doing the only thing the sea knows how to do, which is give back what the water has taken.

The people walked. The sea went on paying a debt that had already been collected.