Passover and the Sea

Before the instructions come the dates: 'This month is the beginning of months for you; it shall be the first month of your year' (12:2). Israel's time is reset around this night. Whatever else the exodus is, the text treats it as the event from which the rest of the nation's life is measured.

The instructions themselves are domestic. A lamb per household, small households joining with neighbours so nothing is wasted. No blemish. Blood applied to the two doorposts and the lintel with a cluster of hyssop. Roasted, not boiled. Eaten with unleavened bread and bitter herbs, dressed for travel, sandals on, staff in hand, in haste. This is not a temple rite performed by priests; there is no temple and there are no priests. It is a family meal in a slave's house on the last night of slavery.

The name pesach is usually rendered 'pass over', and the verb's precise sense is debated: some argue for 'leap over', others for 'protect', pointing to Isaiah 31:5 where the same verb describes God shielding Jerusalem like hovering birds. Either way the logic of the night is that the household under the blood is not entered.

One detail resists sentimentality. What is killed is the firstborn, and the text has prepared for it since 4:22: Israel is God's firstborn son, and Pharaoh's refusal to release him now falls on Egypt's sons. Those who leave are not only Israelites: 12:38 records a mixed multitude, erev rav, going up with them. The founding community of Israel already contains people who joined it on the way out.

The Hebrew is yam suph. Suph means reeds, and it is the same word used in chapter 2 for the reeds where the infant Moses was hidden. 'Reed Sea' is the literal rendering, and the traditional 'Red Sea', which the BSB prints in 13:18 (its footnote offers 'Or the Sea of Reeds'), comes through the Septuagint's erythra thalassa and the Latin after it.

Candidates for the crossing therefore range from the shallow lake systems of the eastern Delta, such as Lake Ballah or the Bitter Lakes, to the Gulf of Suez, to the Gulf of Aqaba in reconstructions that place Sinai in Arabia. The geography of Exodus 13 and 14 names places whose locations are themselves disputed, so the route argument tends to circle.

It is worth noticing that the narrative supplies a mechanism without weakening its own claim: 'all that night the LORD drove back the sea with a strong east wind that turned it into dry land' (14:21). The text is not embarrassed by means. What it insists on is timing and agency: the waters part when Israel is trapped, and close when Egypt is in them. Moses' instruction in 14:14 is the most passive command in the Torah: 'The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still.'

Students will be asked when the exodus happened, and they should be able to lay out both cases fairly.

The early date, about 1446 BC, rests first on 1 Kings 6:1, which says Solomon began the temple in the four hundred and eightieth year after Israel came out of Egypt. With Solomon's fourth year around 966 BC the arithmetic yields the mid fifteenth century. Judges 11:26 supports it independently, where Jephthah speaks of three hundred years of Israelite presence in Transjordan. Some advocates connect the disruption reported in the Amarna letters, where local rulers complain of habiru unsettling Canaan, with an Israelite arrival.

The late date, in the thirteenth century under Ramesses II, rests first on Exodus 1:11, which names the store city Rameses. The city of Pi-Ramesse was built under Ramesses II, and the name would be anachronistic much earlier. It also fits the Merneptah Stele of about 1208 BC, which requires Israel to be in Canaan by then but not long established, and it is argued to fit better with the archaeology of Canaanite destruction layers and the emergence of highland villages in the Iron Age I period.

Each side has an answer to the other. Early-date defenders argue that Rameses could be a later scribal updating of an older place name, a practice attested elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. Late-date defenders argue the 480 years is schematic, twelve generations of forty, and that biblical numbers of this kind often carry structure rather than arithmetic.

The responsible summary is that the late date currently holds the wider following among archaeologists, that the early date has serious defenders working from the text's own chronology, and that a student who can state both arguments with their supporting evidence has learned more than one who can only name a year.

Chapter 15 changes register from narrative to poetry, and the poetry is strange. Its spelling, its verb forms, its use of an older relative particle and its sparing use of the definite article all differ from classical biblical Hebrew prose. Albright, Cross and Freedman argued from those features that the Song of the Sea is among the oldest continuous Hebrew we possess, perhaps twelfth or eleventh century, older than the narrative that now frames it. Others contest the dating of Hebrew poetry by linguistic archaism, noting that poets can write in a deliberately old-fashioned register. The debate is unresolved, but the linguistic strangeness itself is not in question.

What the song says matters more than when it was written. 'Who among the gods is like You, O LORD?' (15:11) is a question rather than a denial, phrased in the world of a people who had lived among many claimed deities and had just watched one order of divine power fail. And the closing line, 'The LORD will reign forever and ever' (15:18), is the first declaration of God's kingship in the Bible. It arrives not from a throne room but from people standing on a shore with wet sandals.

Then Miriam, called a prophetess, takes a tambourine and leads the women, and her couplet in 15:21 repeats the song's opening. Many scholars regard her lines as the oldest fragment of the chapter, the seed around which the longer poem grew. The exodus ends, textually, in a woman's voice.