The Song at the Sea praises God not only for His power but for His patience. The Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael highlights a detail that the Israelites themselves recognized as they sang at the shore: "You brought ten plagues upon Egypt, and You did not decree destruction upon them until they had consummated their evil."
This is a remarkable statement. The ten plagues were not sudden, impulsive acts of divine wrath. They were measured. Sequential. Each plague was a warning, an escalation, a chance for Pharaoh to relent. Blood. Frogs. Lice. Flies. Pestilence. Boils. Hail. Locusts. Darkness. Only after all nine had failed to move Pharaoh—only after Egypt had "consummated their evil" by refusing every opportunity to repent—did God bring the tenth and final plague, the death of the firstborn.
The Mekhilta places this observation within a broader pattern. The preceding passages discuss how God dealt similarly with other wicked peoples. The generation of the Flood received 120 years of warning before the waters came. The people of Sodom were investigated before judgment fell. In every case, God's pattern was the same: warn first, judge last. Punishment came only after every avenue of mercy had been exhausted.
For the rabbis, this teaching carried profound theological weight. It demonstrated that divine justice is never arbitrary. God does not destroy on a whim. Even the Egyptians—who had enslaved Israel for generations, drowned their infant sons, and defied God's explicit commands—received ten separate opportunities to turn back. The destruction at the sea was not the beginning of God's judgment. It was the end of God's patience, arriving only after evil had run its full, terrible course.