The Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael offers a vivid interpretation of God's attack on the Egyptian army during the crossing of the Red Sea, reading the verse "And He shall let fly His shafts and scatter them" as a description of coordinated divine assault from multiple directions.
According to this teaching, God's shafts, His arrows, scattered the Egyptians in one direction, while His lightnings "huddled" them in another. The image is of an army caught in a pincer movement of cosmic proportions. Divine projectiles drove the soldiers apart, dispersing their formations, while bolts of lightning herded them back together into terrified clusters. The Egyptians could neither hold their ground nor flee. Scattered and then compressed, they were trapped in a cycle of chaos orchestrated from heaven.
The Mekhilta then interprets the word "vayehumam," typically translated as "and they were confounded," with a startling physical detail: "He took their greaves." Greaves are the metal shin-guards worn by soldiers to protect their legs. God stripped the armor from the Egyptians' bodies. Without their leg protection, the soldiers stumbled and fell. They did not know what they were doing. The confusion was not merely psychological. It was physical and material. Their weapons failed. Their armor disappeared. Their formations collapsed.
This interpretation transforms the crossing of the sea from a single dramatic moment, the waters closing, into a sustained military rout. Before the waters ever came crashing down, God had already defeated the Egyptian army through shafts, lightning, and the supernatural removal of their armor. The Egyptians were broken, scattered, and stripped bare before the sea returned. The drowning was not the battle. It was the aftermath. God had already won.