The Hebrew of the Song of the Sea says the waters "piled up." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan gives us a different picture entirely, more vivid and more strange: For by the Word from before Thee the waters became heaps; they stood, as if bound like skins that confine flowing water, and the depths were congealed in the flood of the great sea.
Bound wineskins. That is the Targum's image. Picture a leather skin sewn tight, swelling with liquid it cannot release. The waters of the Yam Suph stood that way, pressurized, alive, straining to rush back in, held only by the Word (memra) of the Holy One.
The Targum uses the word memra here deliberately. The memra is the creative Word of God, the same Word that spoke the world into being at the start of <a href='/texts/bereshit-rabbah-1-1.html'>creation</a>. The paraphrast is telling us that the parting of the sea was not a natural event nudged by a strong wind. It was a second act of creation, a re-spoken cosmos where water learned, briefly, to behave like leather.
And then the second image: the depths were congealed. The Aramaic verb suggests clotting, thickening, the way blood thickens or honey stiffens in cold. The deep itself grew still.
The Maggid's takeaway: when the world seems fluid and dangerous, remember that the same Word that speaks creation can also speak stillness. A sea bound like a wineskin is still a sea. It has not forgotten how to drown. It has only been told, for a moment, to hold.