The Ten Songs of History and Who Dared to Sing First

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The Night Heaven Leaned In to Sing

The sea stood open in two walls of water, and the water did not fall. Down the corridor of wet sand the last of Pharaoh's chariots slid backward into the returning waves, wheels still spinning, and the sound of drowning men carried across the channel. High above the throne the angels leaned forward with their mouths already shaping the first note.

They had watched all night. They had seen the pillar of cloud stand between the two camps, seen the waters rear back before a wind that blew until morning, seen a whole nation walk out of slavery on a dry road cut through the deep. Now the enemy was gone under the sea, and every host of heaven wanted to be first to praise the One who had done it.

God Silenced the Choir for the Sake of His Children

"My hosts are in distress," God said, "and you would recite song before Me?"

The angels went still. All that night the two camps had stood across the divided water and one had not approached the other. The same words that measured the distance between Israel and Egypt, this one calling to that one, were the words heaven kept for its own holiest music, when one burning creature calls across to another and they answer that the Lord of hosts fills the whole earth with His glory. On the night of the sea that calling stopped. The seraphim who never tire of singing were told to wait, because the children who had just come up out of the grave of the water had not yet opened their mouths.

The King Whose Son Came Back From Capture

It was, heaven learned, like a king whose son had been seized and carried off, and then brought home alive. When the boy was returned, the whole household pressed forward to praise the king for the rescue. But the king raised his hand. Let the son speak first, he said. He is the one who was bound. He is the one who tasted the fear.

So it was at the water. The servants of the palace could sing tomorrow, or in a thousand years, for they do not die. The children of Israel were flesh and blood, and flesh and blood must sing while it still has breath. There is a word at the head of their song, and the word does not say "then they sang." It leans toward "then they will sing," as if a door were being held open for a voice that had not yet come. Let Moses and the children of Israel sing first. Only after them the musicians of heaven.

The Word That Meant They Finally Believed

Rabbi Abahu stood over a knot in the verses and would not let it go. In Egypt, before a single plague had fallen, it was already written that the people believed. And another verse says their ancestors in Egypt did not comprehend His wonders at all. Which was it? Had they believed, or had they not?

Both, he taught, and neither was yet the whole of it. In Egypt they had a belief that came and went, a hope that flickered when the taskmaster turned his back and died when the whip came down. Real faith, the kind that forces a song out of a throat, had not yet been born in them. It was born at the sea. When they watched the hand that grasps judgment close on their masters, when they saw the water fold the chariots under and not one rider rise, then they believed.

The song opens on one small word, az (אז), "then." Abahu heard faith hidden inside it. It is the same word that follows Joseph through the house of his Egyptian master. From the hour Potiphar set him over everything he owned and the blessing came upon the house, Scripture marks the turn with that same "then." It is the word of a master who hands over every key and keeps nothing back, the word of total trust. On the shore that trust broke open in Israel all at once. The spirit of God settled on them, and the song came up out of them like water finding its level.

The women went out after the men with drums already in their hands, and Miriam the prophetess led them, dancing, into the sound that had begun.

One Song in a Chain of Ten

The song at the sea was not the first song, and it would not be the last. The sages count ten of them strung across all of time, ten moments when rescue broke into the world and someone answered it aloud. The night of the Passover in Egypt had its song. The sea had this one. There would be a song at the well in the wilderness, a song at Sinai when the mountain smoked, the songs of kings and prophets, and at the far end of the count a song not yet sung, kept for the age when the last enemy falls and does not rise again.

Every link in that chain remembers a morning. The morning God looked down through the cloud on the Egyptian camp and threw it into panic. The morning the ground lay white with manna. The morning the mountain shook and a whole people stood trembling at its foot. And behind each rescue stood the same refuge, the fortress that held against Pharaoh, against Amalek, against every hand that would ever rise to swallow them. Moses stood on the wet sand with the water still walled on either side, and he opened his mouth, and the melody he set that morning is the one heaven has been waiting its turn to sing ever since.