3. They are confounded in the land, / The wilderness has closed round them. Since God has just given the most precise instructions as to where the Israelites should establish their camp, this quotation of what Pharaoh says when he hears of the Israelites’ movements is a strong indication that God has set up what amounts in military terms to an ambush. Pharaoh, seeing that the Hebrews have not followed the short and obvious coastal route to get out of Egypt northward, concludes that they have lost their way (“they are confounded in the land”) and have inadvertently allowed themselves to be pinned down on the shore of the Sea of Reeds (“The wilderness has closed round them”), where the pursuing troops will easily surround them and recapture the whole mass of runaway slaves. Note that Pharaoh, in his regal confidence, speaks in verse—two semantically complementary clauses with three nicely scanning beats in each, nevukhím hém baʾárets / sagár ʾaleihém hamidbár. What the Egyptian leader can scarcely foresee is that the Hebrews will be able to flee into the sea, which then will turn into a death trap for the pursuing Egyptian troops. The place-names stipulated in God’s instructions to Moses have not been identified, though it might be noted that they are all Hebrew names, with the exception of Pi-Hahiroth, which appears to have an Egyptian prefix.

4. that I may gain glory. The Hebrew verb ʾikavdah, as anyone reading the story in the original would notice, plays on the same word kaved, “heavy,” that has been repeatedly used for the severity of the plagues, the hardness of Pharaoh’s heart, and the density of the Israelites’ livestock.

5. about the people. It is noteworthy that through this section the Israelites are several times referred to simply as “the people,” the perspective of the narrative, the audience, and of God having become thoroughly an Israelite national perspective.

from our service. Literally, “from serving us.” The multivalent “send” is now given its explicit legal sense of manumission.

6. his troops. The literal meaning of ʿamo is “his people,” but ʿam in military contexts regularly refers to troops, and Pharaoh clearly has not taken the entire people with him, only his army.

7. and all the chariots of Egypt. That is, Pharaoh took not only the elite chariotry, but in fact the entire Egyptian chariot corps.

captains. The Hebrew shalishim has never been definitively explained. It appears to be derived from sheloshah, “three,” and may refer to the division of the army into command units of three and thirty (compare 2 Samuel 23:9–23). Some have conjectured that the shalish would be the third man or commander in a war chariot, but Egyptian chariots appear to have had crews of only two men. A few scholars have suggested a Ugaritic cognate meaning “bronze,” as in bronze armor, the term by metonymy referring to a warrior or officer.

8. with a high hand. Nahum Sarna proposes that the idiom is drawn from depictions of ancient Near Eastern gods brandishing a weapon in the upraised right hand. The English “high-handed” has some kinship with the notion of defiance conveyed by the Hebrew expression. “Hand” has figured centrally in the entire Exodus narrative both in God’s powerful hand against Egypt and Moses’s outstretched hand (or arm, the Hebrew yad often covering both) unleashing the plagues, as here it will split the sea.

11. Was it for lack of graves in Egypt. After the initial complaints of the Israelites against Moses, we have been given no information about their collective mental state. Now we see them as fearful and as recalcitrant as they were at the beginning. This moment becomes the first of a whole series of “murmurings” that will punctuate the Wilderness narrative.

What is this you have done to us . . .? These words are a pointed echo of the words of Pharaoh’s courtiers, “What is this we have done?” (verse 5).

12. Isn’t this the thing we spoke to you in Egypt. These words amount to delayed narrative exposition since, before this revelation in the people’s dialogue, there was no report of their having said they would perish in the wilderness and so should stay in slavery. Alternately, they may be inventing words that they never said, but now imagine what they may never actually have said.

13. Do not be afraid. Moses has already proven himself an irascible figure, and he will be quick to anger in subsequent episodes. Here, however, he recognizes that the complaint of the newly freed slaves stems from fear, and so he reassures them.

for as you see the Egyptians today, you shall not see them again for all time. The defeat will be so crushing that Egypt will never again attain this zenith of imperial power. This ringing statement is not the least of the exercises in gratifying historical fantasy in the story. Egypt in fact continued to be an intermittent military threat to Israel throughout the First Commonwealth period.

15. Why do you cry out to me? This is a little puzzling because there has been no report of Moses’s crying out to the LORD. The least strained solution is that of Abraham ibn Ezra, who argues that since Moses is the spokesman of the people, if the people cry out, God can readily attribute the crying out to Moses.

19. the messenger of God that was going before the camp. In the initial report of the pillars of cloud and of fire, God Himself was going before the Israelite camp. The introduction of an agent of the deity here is either an explanation in the original narrative of what God’s presence before the people actually meant or an interpolation of later tradition in order to mitigate the anthropomorphism.

20. and it lit up the night. This clause is ambiguous, especially because the antecedent would have to be the pillar of cloud, which does not give off light. Perhaps one might view these words as a telescoping of a temporal shift: the Egyptians approach the Israelites, who are clearly in full view, in daylight, perhaps, one may infer, in the late afternoon. The pillar of cloud swings around from Israelite front to rear in order to form a barrier between the Hebrews and the Egyptians. As night falls, the pillar of cloud (“and there was the cloud”) in response to the gathering darkness (“and the dark”) turns into fire (“and it lit up the night”).

21. wind . . . sea dry ground. The key terms here hark back to the first creation (God’s breath-spirit-wind, ruaḥ; the dividing between sea and dry land). His power over the physical elements of the world He created is again manifested, this time in a defining event in the theater of history.

split apart. Not merely “divided,” for the Hebrew verb baqaʿ is a violent one, the word that would be used for splitting wood with an axe.

22. the waters a wall to them on their right and on their left. Ilana Pardes persuasively identifies birth imagery in this whole story. The passage through waters—led by a man who has been saved from water, after a genocidal decree in which water was to be the means of killing the babies—is the beginning of the birth of the nation, and Pardes aptly sees the large narrative from Exodus to Numbers as the “biography of a nation.”

24. in the morning watch. By Israelite reckoning, the last third of the night, from 2:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. The Hebrews, then, would have marched through the Sea of Reeds during the night, literally plunging into the dark, for the pillar of fire would have been behind them rather than leading them on their way.

the LORD looked out. The Hebrew verb hishqif is generally reserved for looking down or out from a high vantage point.

in a pillar of fire and cloud. The double identification is presumably because of the moment of transition toward daybreak when the fire becomes cloud. The narrative sequence at this point is not entirely clear, but it might be sorted out as follows: during the night, the Israelites make their way across the sea, with the protective pillar of fire following after them. The Egyptians, seeing their movement, which would be joined with the receding pillar of fire, begin pursuit. As day breaks, God looks down on them from the pillar of fire just as it turns back into a pillar of cloud. As the water begins to seep back, the Egyptians turn round and flee.

25. He took off the wheels of their chariots. There is some dispute about the sense of the verb, which usually means to “take away,” “take off,” “remove.” The simplest explanation is that as the water begins to seep back and before it becomes a flood that engulfs the Egyptians, it turns the dry ground into muck. The chariot wheels rapidly become stuck in the mud (“He . . . drove them heavily”) and break off from the axles. In all this tale of the utter destruction of the Egyptian chariots, there is a kind of allaying of a recurrent Israelite fear. From a number of references in the Book of Judges, we can infer that the highland-based Hebrews were poorly equipped with chariots and vulnerable, at least when they fought on level terrain, to the chariots of the Canaanites, which would have been a rough ancient equivalent of armored corps in a modern army. The heavy chariots must have often appeared terrifying to the lightly armed Israelites. In the story of the victory at the Sea of Reeds, the mighty Egyptian chariot corps is rendered helpless, and this particular aspect of the Egyptian defeat is made a focal point of the narrative.

27. the Egyptians fleeing toward it. The Hebrew preposition used here clearly means “toward.” What is suggested is the following sequence: the Egyptian troops are struck with panic, perhaps at the sight of the pillar of cloud and fire, surely by the fact that their chariots have lost traction on what had briefly been dry land in the sea; they flee, presumably in the direction from which they had come, but the flood of water comes down on them from that very direction. The male warriors of the nation that had sought to drown every Hebrew male child now meet a fate of death by drowning.

29. the waters a wall to them. This key phrase serves as a formal refrain, and will be picked up in the Song of the Sea.

31. the great hand. “Hand” here obviously means something like “demonstration of power,” but it picks up all the previous uses of “hand,” both literal and figurative, in this story of liberation from bondage.

they trusted in the LORD and in Moses His servant. The whole story had begun with Moses’s understandable doubt as to whether the people would trust, or believe, him. Now all doubt is banished (for the moment) in the great triumph at the Sea of Reeds.