The Torah says that God tested Israel at Marah with the word "nisahu." But what does this word actually mean? Two rabbis offered completely different readings.
Rabbi Yehoshua argued that "nisahu" comes from a root meaning to elevate or exalt. God did not test the Israelites at Marah — He elevated them to greatness. Rabbi Yehoshua supported this with two parallel uses of the same root: (2 Kings 25:27), where Evil-Merodach "elevated" the exiled King Yehoyachin, and (Numbers 4:22), where God commands Moses to "elevate" the sons of Gershon by counting them. In both cases, the word carries a sense of honoring and raising up, not testing.
Rabbi Elazar Hamodai challenged this reading on linguistic grounds. The word for "greatness" or "elevation" is spelled with a shin, but the word in this verse — "nisahu" — is spelled with a samech. Different letters, different meaning. With a samech, the word means "tried" or "tested." What actually happened at Marah, then, was that God put Israel to the test.
This debate illustrates how much weight the rabbis placed on individual Hebrew letters. A single consonant — shin versus samech — could determine whether an entire episode was understood as a divine reward or a divine trial. The same event at Marah could be read as God honoring His people or God challenging them, depending entirely on how you parsed one word's spelling.