The Sea Closes on Egypt and the Mire That Pulled Them Down

Most people read the Song of the Sea as Israel cheering at the water's edge, a war ballad chanted over enemy corpses. The sages who built the Yalkut Shimoni, the great thirteenth-century anthology that gathers older midrash into one running commentary, heard something colder and more exact underneath the music. They heard arithmetic. Every word of the song, they insisted, is a receipt. The drowning of Egypt was not rage. It was a bill coming due, paid back in the precise currency Egypt had spent.

Start with the river. Years before the sea, Pharaoh had issued a decree that turned water into a grave. Every Hebrew boy was to be flung into the Nile, the river Egypt worshiped, the river that fed the whole kingdom. A generation of infants went under. Mothers in Goshen learned the sound a small body makes when it hits the current.

The Receipt Hidden in the Song

So when the verse sings that Pharaoh's chariots and his army were cast into the sea (Exodus 15:4), the rabbis of the midrash aggadah tradition catch the echo and will not let it go. This is the principle they call middah keneged middah (מדה כנגד מדה), measure for measure. By the very measure a person metes out, the rabbis teach, it is measured back. Egypt threw children into water. Now water closes over Egypt.

The reading of Pharaoh's chariots cast into the sea insists the Holy One, blessed be He, does not punish at random or in excess. He repays a nation in the exact coin of its own cruelty. The instrument of Egypt's crime becomes the instrument of Egypt's ruin. The same waves that should have swallowed Hebrew babies swallow their oppressors instead. There is a strange mercy folded inside that severity. A God who keeps so exact an account is a God who did not forget the drowned children of Goshen, who heard the cries the Nile carried away, and who kept the ledger open until the day it could be settled.

Counting the Chariots, One by One

The sages keep counting. Scripture says Egypt mustered six hundred chariots for the chase (Exodus 14:7), so the song answers that those chariots were swept into the deep. Scripture says Pharaoh set captains over every unit, so the song declares that the choicest of his officers were sunk in the Sea of Reeds. The midrash on the six hundred chariots matches each line of the pursuit to a line of the drowning. Nothing Egypt did goes unanswered. The army that rolled out in formation goes down in the same formation, captain for captain, wheel for wheel.

Then comes the sharpest cut of the whole reading, and it turns on a single Hebrew verb. The song says the captains were tav'u, sunk, in the sea. The rabbis notice that this exact word appears twice more in the Hebrew Bible, both times for something thicker than water. It is the word for Jeremiah lowered into a muddy cistern until he sank into the mire (Jeremiah 38:6). It is the word the psalmist cries when he says he has sunk in deep mud and there is no foothold (Psalms 69:3). Sinking, the sages conclude, means clay.

Drowned in the Clay They Forced

Now the receipt turns brutal. Israel's lives in Egypt had been embittered with mortar, kneading wet clay into bricks under the lash, sinking into endless toil. So the Holy One thickened the floor of the sea into that same mud. The Egyptian soldiers were not simply swept under and finished. They were trapped. Sucked down. Struggling in the heavy muck the slaves had been forced to work for generations. The water of the sea became the mire of Egypt. For one terrible moment the masters felt exactly what they had inflicted, their boots and wheels and bodies dragged into clay that would not let go.

This is what the sages mean by an exact measure rendered in clay. Egypt had made mortar an instrument of torment, watching slaves sink into bricks without end. Now Egypt sinks, not into bricks but into the sea bed, paying the same coin back grain for grain. The toil that broke Hebrew bodies becomes the trap that holds Egyptian ones.

The Wall That Was Also a Rage

One question hangs over the whole scene. Did Pharaoh himself go down with his men? The Yalkut preserves the old dispute. Rabbi Yehuda holds that Pharaoh drowned with the rest, since the song names the chariots of Pharaoh and his host together. Rabbi Natan answers that Pharaoh alone was spared, because God had told him to his face that he was kept standing only so that the divine power could be shown through him (Exodus 9:16). Others split the difference and say that in the end Pharaoh too went down, since a later verse speaks of the horse of Pharaoh entering the sea (Exodus 15:19).

The midrash of Israel walking into the sea on dry ground adds two images that linger. The ministering angels were astounded, the sages say, watching Israel step onto the sea floor: a people stained with idolatry, walking through where Egypt drowns? And the water itself, they teach, was not calm. The verse calls the sea a chomah, a wall, on Israel's right and left, but the Hebrew is written without one letter, so it can be read chema, rage. The walls of water stood up around Israel like fury barely held in check, ready to fall.

What held that rage back from Israel while it crashed down on Egypt? The right side, the sages answer, was Torah, the fiery law Israel would receive at Sinai. The left side was the bond of tefillin. The same standing water was wall to one nation and grave to the other. Israel walked between two cliffs of barely restrained fury and came out the far side dry, while behind them the clay closed over the men who had once measured out clay by the brickload.