The Ten Songs That Run Through Jewish History

The rabbis of the second century CE did a strange thing. They sat with the Hebrew Bible open in their laps and went looking for songs. Not poems. Not prayers. Songs. Moments in the national story where a human being was so overwhelmed by what had just happened that words alone were not enough, and the person broke into melody. And when they were done counting, they had nine, with one still outstanding, and the whole arc of Jewish history arranged into a single line of music.

The count belongs 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. It appears in the Mekhilta's commentary on the Song at the Sea, tucked into an almost off-hand remark. There are ten songs in the world, the rabbis say, and then they list them.

The first one, you will not find where you expect to find it. It is not Miriam with the tambourines. It is not Moses by the shore. The Mekhilta reaches all the way back into a night centuries before Sinai. On the night the God of Israel passed through Egypt, killing the firstborn of every household that had not been marked with the blood of a lamb, Israel was inside, singing. The Mekhilta anchors this claim with a verse from Isaiah, where the prophet remembers the night and says that a future deliverance will sound "as in the night when a festival is hallowed" (Isaiah 30:29). That night, the first Passover in roughly the thirteenth century BCE by the Torah's chronology, was the first song. Not a song of victory. A song of survival. Sung in whispers behind bloodied doorposts. Sung by a people who did not yet know if they would be alive by morning.

The second song is the one everyone knows. Moses and the children of Israel standing on the far shore of the Red Sea after Pharaoh's army has drowned. The Torah calls it Shirat HaYam, the Song of the Sea. I will sing to the Lord, for He has triumphed gloriously (Exodus 15:1). The rabbis, in the Mekhilta, linger over the grammar of it. They notice that the verse says Moses and the children of Israel sang, plural, at the same time. The Mekhilta pictures the scene two ways. Either the nation sang along with Moses line by line, like a congregation answering a cantor, or Moses's voice lifted above theirs like a choir soloist with the nation as his chorus. Either way, the water was still settling when the song started.

The third song is sung in the middle of the wilderness, around a well. The Torah's account is four short verses in (Numbers 21:17). Then Israel sang this song. Spring up, O well. Sing unto it. The rabbis read this as one of the strangest moments in the wilderness years. Israel was singing to the ground. To a hole in the ground. Because they understood, by then, that the hole had been following them for forty years, that the water came out of stones when Miriam was alive, and that they owed it a thank-you.

The fourth song is Moses's final song, Ha'azinu, which he wrote and dictated to the entire nation on the day he was told to climb Mount Nebo and die (Deuteronomy 32). The Mekhilta counts it separately from the Song of the Sea because it is completely different in mood. The Song of the Sea is victory. Ha'azinu is a warning dressed as a lullaby. Moses sings into the future and sees every failure of his people before it has happened.

The fifth song is Joshua's, and it is perhaps the shortest song ever counted in the list. One line. Standing in the middle of a battle against the Amorite kings, Joshua looks up at the sun and commands it to stop moving, so that his army will have enough daylight to finish the fight (Joshua 10:12). The Mekhilta counts this as a song because in Hebrew, the verb used is va'yidaber, he spoke, and the same word is used for Moses singing at the sea. The rabbis insist that when a man stops the sun, even if he only says one sentence, that sentence is a song.

The sixth song is Deborah's, and she sings it with her general Barak in roughly the twelfth century BCE, after the Canaanite general Sisera has been defeated and driven into a tent where Yael is waiting for him with a tent peg (Judges 5:1). The song takes up an entire chapter and is one of the oldest surviving pieces of Hebrew poetry. It is also the only one of the ten songs in the Mekhilta's list sung primarily by a woman.

The seventh song is David's. The Mekhilta places it at the moment near the end of David's life when, after a lifetime of wars and escapes and close calls, he composes a song of thanks for every enemy who did not kill him (2 Samuel 22:1). It is one of the densest autobiographies in the Hebrew Bible, and it is almost word-for-word identical to Psalm 18 in the Psalter. The rabbis counted it once, as a single song in two places.

The list keeps going. The eighth is the song of dedication composed for the Temple. The ninth is the Song of Songs, which the rabbis, led by Rabbi Akiva in the second century CE, declared was the holiest of all songs because it described the love between God and Israel in the language of lovers.

And the tenth? The Mekhilta leaves it open. The tenth song has not been sung yet. It is the song Israel will sing, the rabbis insist, on the day the final redemption comes. They base it on a verse in Isaiah (Isaiah 42:10), Sing to the Lord a new song. New song. Not repeated. Never before heard. The rabbis take that phrase as proof that the ten-song sequence is not closed. Nine are behind us. One is in front of us. And the nature of the tenth is that nobody alive knows its melody yet.

Louis Ginzberg, in his Legends of the Jews published in seven volumes between 1909 and 1938 (see the full Ginzberg collection in our database), called this arrangement the spinal column of Jewish history. A skeleton made of songs. Nine moments when the human voice could not contain the experience. And one moment still to come, where everything the Jewish people have lived through, from the night in Egypt to the morning at the sea to the victories of Joshua and Deborah and David to the dedication of the Temple, will be gathered into a single melody no one has ever heard.

The Mekhilta does not promise when. It only says that the list has ten lines, and nine of them are already filled in, and the last one is waiting.