The Mekhilta records a disagreement between two sages about the verse "And they came to Marah" (Exodus 15:23). Rabbi Yehoshua says that Israel came to three places at that time. Rabbi Elazar Hamodai says they came to only one place — Marah itself.
The disagreement hinges on how to read the Hebrew grammar of the surrounding verses. Rabbi Yehoshua sees three distinct stops encoded in the text, suggesting that the journey from the Red Sea to Marah included intermediate encampments that the Torah compresses into a single narrative. The three days of waterless travel were not one continuous march but a series of arrivals and departures, each with its own location and its own disappointment.
Rabbi Elazar Hamodai strips the reading down to its simplest form: one journey, one destination, one arrival. The Israelites left the Red Sea, walked for three days, and arrived at Marah. No hidden stops, no encoded geography.
The Mekhilta itself acknowledges that Rabbi Yehoshua's interpretation requires "elaborate commentary which is beyond the scope of this translation" — a rare editorial admission that the text is more complex than it appears. The very difficulty of the passage became part of the tradition. Sometimes the Torah's meaning is not immediately accessible, and the rabbis were honest enough to say so rather than force a resolution where none was available.