The following is a short thought on this week’s Parshah, Beshalach. For a summary of the Parshah, please click here. For last year’s Beshalach article, “The Metaphor of the Manna,” please click here. For more on the new “short thoughts” format, please click here. *Please also note the following correction: Bnei Yisrael offered the korban Pesach on the fourteenth of Nissan; an earlier version of last week’s article on Parshat Bo inadvertently included a different date. 

After Bnei Yisrael cross the Yam Suf (the Sea of Reeds) and watch their former masters, the Egyptians, drown within it, they erupt in Shirat HaYam (the “Song of the Sea”). This song appears in full in this week’s Parshah, Beshalach. Both its lyrics, and the narrative which surrounds them, offer us prime examples of the ways in which our Torah carefully cascades its language to express multiple layers of meaning simultaneously. Let’s divide our analysis of this phenomenon into two overlapping units: (a) Shirat HaYam along with the story that precedes it—Exod. 13:17-15:19; and (b) Shirat HaYam along with the story that succeeds it—Exod. 14:30-15:27. Our study will focus primarily (though not exclusively) on phonetics, i.e. on words that share similar sounds.[i]  

1. Exod. 13:17-15:19

This unit includes Bnei Yisrael’s exodus from Egypt, their confrontation with the Egyptians on the shores of Yam Suf, and the song which they sing following the death of those Egyptians. Within this unit, we find the following linguistic resonances:

These linguistic resonances serve several literary purposes. At one level, they produce dramatic irony, by underscoring the sharp contrast between the expectations held by our scene’s various stakeholders and the reality that actually unfolds. Thus, for instance, Bnei Yisrael avoid the “close” [קרוב] route for fear of war, only to find Pharaoh “advancing” [הקריב] with his army in hot pursuit; they appear ready to contemplate a “return” [ושבו] to Egypt, but wind up watching the waters of Yam Suf “flowing back” [וישבו] upon, and drowning, the very Egyptians to whom they would have surrendered; etc.

Simultaneously, the linguistic resonances highlight our scene’s poetic justice, i.e. the  middah k’neged middah (“measure for measure”) parallelism that lend it its tight moral symmetry. Pharaoh “harnesses” [ויאסר] his chariot only for Hashem to “remove” [ויסר] its wheels; he chases Bnei Yisrael with a hardened “heart” [לב], but is ultimately cast into the “depths” [בלב] of the sea; etc.

2. Exod. 14:30-15:27

This unit includes Shirat HaYam and the crisis that follows immediately upon its heels, as Bnei Yisrael struggle to find drinkable water in the desert. Within this unit, we find the following linguistic resonances:

As in the previous unit, the verbal links that connect Shirat HaYam with our second scene—Bnei Yisrael’s water crisis in the desert—undoubtedly reflect a form of poetic justice. In this unit, however, the distribution of desserts has been reversed: now it is not the Egyptians, but indeed, Bnei Yisrael themselves, whose actions Hashem counterbalances through the mechanism of middah k’neged middah. Most poignant, in this regard, is the juxtaposition of the Egyptians, who were entirely submerged in water, and the Israelites, who now cannot find water at all.

This narrative apposition is enmeshed within a linguistic matrix that subtly reinforces the passage’s central theme. Bnei Yisrael “sang” [ישיר, שירו] in celebration as they watched the Egyptians drown to their death, but almost met their own deaths in the wilderness of “Shur” [שור]; the women performed jubilant “dances” [מחלות], but they and the rest of the nation came close to contracting “sicknesses” [מחלה] shortly after; etc. To be sure, some of these connections are more compelling than others; but the frequency and density with which they crop up within an episode comprised of no more than five verses in total would appear to indicate that they are indeed directed towards thematic ends.

To wit, their thrust is to temper Bnei Yisrael’s triumphalism with a modicum of timidity—to level the euphoria that rightly overcomes the nation in the wake of its salvation with appropriate empathy for the suffering of the vanquished. Hashem inculcates this empathy within Bnei Yisrael by subjecting them to the near-inverse fate of the one which met their enemies.[iv] Of course, He averts its outcome at the eleventh hour; the purpose of this plight had, after all, been pedagogic, not punitive. But the lesson has been delivered. בנפל אויביך אל תשמח:[v] rejoicing at the loss of human life is distasteful to the Creator of that life. Even when those lives belong to our enemies, then, their end—like the waters of Marah—ought to strike us as bittersweet.

Shabbat shalom!

Notes

[i] Some harbor the assumption that phonetics constitute a branch of linguistics inferior to, say, philology or etymology, and that a focus on the sounds of words, as opposed to the semantics thereof, cannot provide any real insight into the meaning of the text. Yet for centuries, oral communication was the primary mode through which Torah was taught and studied. Moreover, Shirat HaYam, in particular, is a text that was originally produced to be recited aloud. Thus, the notion that its meaning is to be found not only in the denotative, connotative or diachronic properties of its words, but also in the sounds produced when those words are audibly articulated, should not strike us as unreasonable.

[ii] It is interesting that the text here takes pains to designate Miriam as a “prophetess,” i.e., one capable of predicting the future (see Rashi, ad. loc.). In some sense, it is the ability to foresee later events that drives the dynamics of our scene; thus Rashi, citing the Midrash, explains as follows how the women of Bnei Yisrael came to possess the “timbrels” with which they followed Miriam in song: “The righteous women of that generation were so certain that the Holy One, blessed be He, would perform miracles for them, they took timbrels out of Egypt.” Actually, there is a second question that this Midrash answers as well—one that should occur to us if we have been carefully following the progression of events since the exodus—namely: How is it that the same Israelites who failed to pack either bread (see Exod. 12:39, along with last week’s article) or water (as we discover this week, in Exod. 15:22-26, which we have been studying) for their journey into the desert, nevertheless thought to bring along “timbrels?” At the level of peshat, this is a real challenge; but if, following the Midrash, we understand that Bnei Yisrael were “certain that the Holy One, blessed be He, would perform miracles for them,” then the issue is neatly resolved.

[iii] Although ת and ט were in all likelihood distinct phonemes in ancient Israel, it seems that they would have been sufficiently similar to evoke each other.

[iv] Perhaps this is in fact part of what is being intimated in the episode’s conclusion, when Hashem states: כל המחלה אשר שמתי במצרים לא אשים עליך—“all the sickness that I have visited upon Egypt I will not visit upon you” (15:26).

[v] Prov. 24:17. See Megillah 10b: “God does not rejoice at the downfall of the wicked. And R. Yohanan said: “…the ministering angels wanted to sing [along with Bnei Yisrael], but God said: My creations are drowning in the sea and you wish to sing?”