Parshat Beshalach5 min read

Egypt Drowned Hebrew Boys in the Nile, So the Sea Drowned Egypt

Pharaoh flung Hebrew boys into the Nile and the sea swallowed six hundred chariots in return. The rabbis heard arithmetic beneath Israel's victory song.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. The Song Beneath the Song
  2. What Measure for Measure Means
  3. The Mire That Held Them Down
  4. The Children of Israel Walked in Dry Ground
Egypt Drowned Hebrew Boys in the Nile, So the Sea Drowned Egypt Click for full size

The Song Beneath the Song

The Song of the Sea sounds like triumph. Miriam's drum, the crowd at the water's edge, the horses and riders gone under and the other side finally reachable after everything that had been endured. The sages who built the Yalkut Shimoni, the great thirteenth-century anthology, heard something else underneath the music. Something colder and more exact. They heard arithmetic.

Every word of the song, they said, is a receipt. The drowning of Egypt was not an outburst of divine anger. It was a ledger entry, the closing of an account that had been open since the day Pharaoh issued his decree about the Hebrew boys.

Start with the river. The Nile was Egypt's god, its food supply, the vein through which the kingdom's blood ran. And Pharaoh had ordered every Hebrew boy thrown into it. Mothers in Goshen learned what that meant in the weeks and months after the decree. The Nile, which Egypt worshiped, was turned into a mass grave for the children of the people it enslaved. The account was opened then. The sea closed it.

What Measure for Measure Means

The principle the rabbis called middah keneged middah, measure against measure, is not an abstraction. It is a reading method. When you see a punishment in the Torah, look at the crime and find the correspondence. Egypt threw children into water. Water closed over Egypt. The medium is the message. The Nile took infants. The sea took chariots. The weapon Egypt used against the helpless became the weapon God used against the powerful, turned back in kind, in proportion, with precision.

Six hundred chosen chariots, the text says, the best of everything Egypt had, the elite corps of the most powerful army in the known world. All of them went in. The number was exact in the midrash's reading: the same number that had been lost in the river, returned as military hardware sinking in the sea. The rabbis counted. The account balanced.

The Mire That Held Them Down

The sea did not simply drown Egypt. It held Egypt down. The verse says the horsemen were cast into the sea, and another verse says Pharaoh's chariots he cast into the sea, and another says they sank like lead in the mighty waters. The sages read each verse as a different group: the foot soldiers, the horsemen, and the officers, each disposed of separately, each according to what they had done in Egypt. Those who had supervised the throwing of the infants into the river were cast in. Those who had driven the chariots that ran down the fleeing slaves were submerged in the mire.

The mire was specific. The sea floor at the crossing point was soft, and the horses that went in did not simply drown. They sank into the mud and were held there, unable to rise, the way the children had been held under the current of the Nile by the soldiers who threw them. The texture of the punishment matched the texture of the crime. Not just water but the particular heaviness of a body that cannot surface.

The Children of Israel Walked in Dry Ground

While Egypt drowned in mud, Israel walked on dry ground. The same sea, the same moment, two completely different experiences of the water. The Yalkut Shimoni preserved a tradition about the angels who watched this happen and wanted to sing. God stopped them. My creatures are drowning in the sea, He said, and you want to sing? The angels went quiet. Only after the last chariot disappeared did the song begin, and it came from human mouths, not angelic ones.

This detail matters to the measure-for-measure accounting. God did not celebrate Egypt's destruction. He permitted it, He enacted it, He closed the sea over it with the precision of a ledger balanced to the last figure. But He would not let it be a party. The angels who sang too soon were silenced. The song Israel sang was not about joy over corpses but about the crossing, the other side, the dry ground under feet that had been in chains.

Yalkut ShimoniExodusPharaohRed SeaDivine JusticeEgypt
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From the tradition

Sources

5 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.

Yalkut Shimoni on Torah 246:3Yalkut Shimoni on Torah

Translation of the source text.Torat Emet (Yalkut Shimoni) · CC-BY-NC

Another interpretation of "the chariots of Pharaoh" and so on: By the very measure with which they measured, You measured out to them. They had said, "Every son that is born you shall cast into the Nile" (Exodus 1:22) and so on; You too measured out to them by that same measure. Therefore it is said, "the chariots of Pharaoh and his host He has cast into the sea."

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Yalkut Shimoni on Torah 246:4Yalkut Shimoni on Torah

Translation of the source text.Torat Emet (Yalkut Shimoni) · CC-BY-NC

Another interpretation: They said, "and he took six hundred chariots" (Exodus 14:7); You too, "the chariots of Pharaoh and his host." They said, "and captains over all of them" (ibid.); You too, "the choicest of his captains were sunk in the Sea of Reeds." They embittered their lives with mortar; You too, by that same measure, did to them, for You made the waters like mortar, and they kept sinking into them. Therefore it is said, "sunk in the Sea of Reeds," and "sinking" refers to nothing but mortar, as it is said, "and Jeremiah sank into the mire" (Jeremiah 38:6), and it says, "I have sunk in deep mire" (Psalms 69:3). Therefore it is said, "sunk in the Sea of Reeds."

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Yalkut Shimoni on Torah 238Yalkut Shimoni

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.Sefaria Community Translation · CC0

"And the waters will came back and cover the chariot and the horsemen" (Exodus 14:26) And even Par'oh, according to Rabi Yehuda, as it says "the chariots of Phar'oh and his army" (15:4). Rabi Natan says Par'oh was the exception, since we have this verse about him: "maybe for this I made you stand up"(Exodus 9:16). And there are those who say that at the end Par'oh went down and drowned, as it says "and the horse of Par'oh came" (Exodus 15:19). "And the children of Israel went into the sea in dry ground" - the angels of service were astounded, saying: 'the children of Israel, idolaters that they are, are coming on dry land?!' And from where do we know that even the sea was filled with rage from Above? Because the text says "and the waters were like rage to them" [since the vav is missing to the word chomah, wall, it can be read as chema, rage; so you can re-read the verse as "the water was like anger on their right and on their left"]. And what caused them to be saved from their right and their left? From the right, it was Torah, which they would receive later on, as it says "From His right, [He gave] a fiery law to them". And left? This is tefilin.

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Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 18:11Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.The Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel, trans. J. W. Etheridge, London, 1862 · Public Domain

The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan captures Jethro's theological breakthrough in one line: "Now have I known that the Lord is stronger than all powers; for by the very thing by which the Mizraee wickedly would have punished Israel by (drowning them in) the sea, upon themselves came the punishment, in being punished in the sea" (Exodus 18:11).

This is the doctrine of middah k'neged middah, measure for measure, articulated by the first convert in the Torah. Pharaoh had decreed in (Exodus 1:22) that every Hebrew baby boy be thrown into the Nile. The Egyptians had planned to drown Israel. So they drowned.

Jethro's phrasing is precise. He does not say simply that Egypt was defeated. He says they were punished by the very thing they intended to use. The instrument of cruelty became the instrument of justice. The Aramaic underlines it: "by the very thing by which.. upon themselves came the punishment."

The rabbis draw out this theme in countless midrashim, Haman hanged on his own gallows, the sons of Jacob eating grain in the same Egypt where they sold Joseph, Samson bringing down the pillars he was chained to. Jethro is the one who first names the pattern.

The takeaway: evil is often undone by its own mechanics. The trap you build for others is, in the moral architecture of God's world, the trap most likely to catch you.

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Pesikta DeRav Kahana 11:2Pesikta de-Rav Kahana

Translation of the source text.Pesikta de Rav Kahana according to an Oxford manuscript, Dov Mandelbaum ed., N.Y. 1987 · CC-BY

"Say to God, How awesome are Your deeds! Through the greatness of Your power Your enemies cringe before You" (Psalms 66:3). Rabbi Yohanan said: Say to the good Workman, well done!

"How awesome are Your deeds" (ibid.), how fearsome are Your acts of judgment: those who are slain slay their slayers, those who are impaled impale their impalers, those who are sunk sink the ones who sank them. The mouth that said, "Every son that is born you shall cast into the river" (Exodus 1:22) was itself cast into the sea, "Pharaoh's chariots and his army He cast into the sea" (ibid. 15:4).

The rest of the passage is as written above.

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