What Moses Saw in the Heavens Before He Parted the Sea

A sorcerer named Pilti saw Moses coming before Moses was born.

Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, preserving traditions from across the rabbinic world, tells us that Pilti served as a court magician in Pharaoh's palace. He was skilled in reading the Book of Signs, an ancient text of celestial omens. What he read terrified him. A star of Israel was rising. A child would be born who would liberate the Israelites, but the vision was strange: this liberator would be cast into the water, and yet through him the entire people would cross through water to freedom. Pilti warned Pharaoh. Pharaoh ordered every newborn Israelite boy thrown into the Nile.

Moses was born anyway. His mother Jochebed hid him for three months, then placed him in a basket on the Nile, fulfilling the vision's letter without fulfilling its spirit. He was cast into the water. He was also pulled out. The sorcerer had seen the shape of destiny without seeing its irony. The boy the decree was meant to drown became the boy the palace adopted.

The Legends tell us that Moses's father Amram was so renowned as a physician that he served Pharaoh himself, a Israelite doctor in the very court that was trying to kill Israelite children. When Pharaoh's decree came, Amram at first divorced Jochebed to avoid fathering a child who would be killed. His daughter Miriam argued him back: your decree, she told him, is worse than Pharaoh's. Pharaoh only kills the boys. If you abandon your wife, no children survive at all. Amram remarried Jochebed. Moses was born.

Moses grew up in Pharaoh's palace. He grew up in Midian. He stood before a burning bush. He went back to Egypt, demanded freedom, watched ten plagues break Egypt's will, and then found himself standing at the edge of the sea with an army behind him and deep water in front of him and an entire people waiting to see what he would do.

He prayed.

The same Legends of the Jews preserves the remarkable tradition that God told Moses, sharply, to stop praying. This is not a moment for prayer, God said. This is a moment for action. The sea will not part because you ask nicely. Lift your staff. Move forward. The miracle is waiting on the other side of you deciding to do something. Moses, according to this tradition, stood there for a long moment. Then he lifted his staff and walked toward the water.

But what had Moses already seen before he arrived at the shore? What had he been shown between the burning bush and the sea?

When Moses ascended to receive the Torah, Ginzberg's account describes a journey through multiple heavens, each stranger than the last. In the fourth heaven, Moses found a Temple not built of stone but of pure fire. The pillars were red fire. The staves were green fire. The thresholds glowed with white fire, and the gates shimmered like polished carbuncle stones, with pinnacles of pure ruby above them. Angels streamed in and out, singing without pause. Moses asked his guide Metatron, the great angel who serves as celestial interpreter and heavenly scribe, who these beings were. Metatron explained: these are the souls of the righteous, still praising God from inside a structure that has always existed, the heavenly original of the Temple that would one day be built on earth. The earthly Temple was a copy of what Moses was already standing inside.

Then Moses reached the seventh heaven.

In the last heaven, he saw two angels of terrifying size: Af, the angel of Anger, and Hemah, the angel of Wrath. Each was five hundred parasangs tall, a parasang is roughly three miles, which means each angel stretched from the earth to somewhere near the upper edge of the atmosphere. They were forged from chains of black fire and red fire, created at the very beginning of the world to carry out God's will. Moses trembled. Metatron steadied him: fear not, you are the favorite of God, even these cannot touch you today. And Moses, hearing this from the angel who knew every secret of the celestial architecture, found his calm again.

What the tradition is doing here is telling us something about Moses that the plain text of the Torah leaves unstated. By the time Moses stood at the edge of the sea, he was not simply a man trying to lead an impossible migration. He was a man who had been to the heights of heaven and come back. He had walked through a Temple made of fire, had stood next to angels forged from wrath and survived it, had seen the heavenly original of a building that would not be constructed on earth for another four hundred years. He had seen what was coming before it came. When God told him to stop praying and move, Moses had context the frightened people standing behind him did not have. He had seen where this was going. He lifted the staff. He walked forward. The sea divided and they all crossed through.