midweek midrash

As I was taking a break from my studies yesterday, I picked up James Kugel’s masterful Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as It Was at the Start of the Common Era, which is an expanded version of his shorter (and much cheaper) The Bible As It Was. Each chapter he traces interpretive traditions surrounding sections of the OT. I read through the chapter on the Red Sea (Sea of Reeds) in light of this Monday’s midrash. I found this following section interesting, mostly because I had never thought about it before. I was also struck, yet again, at how closely the Jewish community read the OT and how much profundity they placed in each word. We can definitely learn a few things from them.

Everything that follows is from Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as It Was at the Start of the Common Era, 588-90. The text set in the quotation format are the quotations that Kugel includes, with the bold and clarifications being added by Kugel. Everything else is his commentary. Enjoy.

More than One Miracle

God split the Red Sea in two—here, surely, was a miracle. And yet, interpreters were inclined to suppose that more than one miracle had occured. To begin with, another account of the Exodus in the book of Psalms seemed to say that all of nature was thrown into turmoil in the event:

You redeemed Your people with Your mighty arm, the children of Jacob and Joseph.
The waters saw You, O God, the waters say You and trembled, the very depths shook.
The clouds poured out water and the heavens thundered, Your lightning-darts flashed about.
The crash of Your thunder was in the whirlwind, lightning lit up the land, the earth trembled and shook.
 You made Your path through the sea, Your way through the watery depths, though Your traces were not seen.
You led your people like a flock, by the hand of Moses and Aaron. —Ps. 77.15-20

 Interpreters were spurred by such passages to view the crossing of the sea itself as fraught with the supernatural. Indeed, more than once the Bible implied that several different miracles were involved:

…And the signs [miracles] and deeds that He did within Egypt, to Pharaoh the Egyptian king, and to all the land, and which He did to the army of Egypt, its horses and chariotry, over whom He caused the waters of the Red Sea to flood as they pursued you, and the Lord destroyed them to this very day. —Duet. 11.3-4

Read in a certain way, this text might be held to suggest that God’s signs (in the plural) were actually done in two places, “within Egypt” and again at the Red Sea. SImilarly:

And You saw our fathers’ oppression in Egypt, and You heard their cry at the Red Sea. Then you performed signs and wonders against Pharaoh and all his servants and all the people of the land, for you knew that they had ill-treated them; and so You made for yourself a name, as it is to this day. And You split the sea before them, and they crossed on dry land amidst the sea. —Neh. 9.9-11

If one takes seriously the sequence of actions presented here, it seems that God performed “signs and wonders” for Israel after having heard their cry as the Red Sea. If so, these signs and wonders—again in the plural—were performed in addition to the signs and wonders that constituted the ten plagues. Still more explicitly:

[Later, the Israelites] forgot God their savior, who had done marvelous things in Egypt,
wonders in the land of Ham, miracles [in the plural] at the Red Sea. —Ps. 106.21-22

 It may thus be no accident that some interpreters referred to a plurality of miracles at the Red Sea.

Those protected by Your hand passed through [the Red Sea] as one nation, after gazing on marvelous wonders. —Wisd. 19.8

More explicitly:

Ten miracles were done for our ancestors in Egypt, and ten more on the Sea. —m. Abot 5.4

R. Yose ha-Gelili said: How can we deduce that the Egyptians not only suffered ten plagues in Egypt, but fifty plagues at the Red Sea? With regard to [the plagues in] Egypt, what does the text say? “And the wizards said to Pharaoh, ‘It is the finger of God!’” At the Red Sea, however, what does the text day? “And God saw the mighty hand which the Lord had used against the Egyptians…”[Exod. 14.31]. If, by the “finger of God” they had suffered ten plagues, one might conclude that at the Red Sea [where the "hand of God" appeared] they were stricken with fifty plagues! —Passover Haggadah

[Endnote: One of the miracles that Kugel later explores is that the Red Sea not only split to reveal dry ground, but grass and trees also appeared so that the livestock of Israel could be fed on the way across the Sea.]