Commentary on Exodus 14:19-31

The story of God’s deliverance of the Hebrew people from Pharaoh’s army at the Red Sea is arguably the foundational narrative of the Bible. In the account that stretches from Exodus 1 to Exodus 15, we hear testimony about the identity of this God, God’s relationship to God’s people Israel, and the character of this God as a powerful savior who delivers God’s people from oppression. This is a God who hears the cries of the Hebrew slaves and does something about it. This is a God who, through acts of wonder and might, demonstrates superiority to the tyrant Pharaoh and the would-be gods of Egypt. This is the God whom Jesus will worship as a faithful Jew, and this is the God whom Christians testify is “of one being” with Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

It is important for Christian congregations to be reminded of the oneness of God across Old and New Testaments, because too often people of faith hold to the old fallacy that the so-called “God of the Old Testament” is different than the “God of the New Testament,” when in fact both sections of the Bible testify to the same God. For some readers the idea that “Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore” (Exodus 14:30b) seems incongruent with the nonviolence of Jesus, so the work-around for this cognitive dissonance becomes either a bifurcation of Scripture into two barely related halves, or a similarly harmful idea of the “evolution” of ideas about God from one testament to the next. 

But the God who raised Jesus from the dead is the same God who drowned Pharaoh’s army in the ocean. So how might preachers proclaiming Exodus 14 help their audiences embrace this connection?

1. Remind them that Scripture is testimony. The writers of the Bible had points to make beyond simply preserving old traditions. They were crafting stories to meet certain moments—to provide their testimony about who this God is and why their audiences needed to know these things about this God. Scripture collects many different testimonies dating from diverse eras of ancient Israelite history and reflecting multiple viewpoints. 

So, while the story of God’s destruction of Pharaoh’s army is a core narrative of the Old Testament, it exists alongside other tales that emphasize God’s mercy, even toward the enemies of God’s people (for example, the book of Jonah). As readers who witness these diverse testimonies, we see glimpses of the character of God in each, but no single text captures the totality of that character. Said differently, the testimony of the exodus story is—like any biblical passage taken in isolation—reliable, yet incomplete.

2. Proclaim that God is accessed through the particular, not the general. Whether story, poem, or law, each text of the Bible is rooted in the life of a particular people at a specific time and place. In the same way, no single reader represents the totality of human experience. Rather, we as individuals and communities read Scripture from our own bodies, in our own cultural locations, and at our own moment in history. Just as no single author’s story captures the fullness of God, no single reader’s interpretation of that story can grasp it, either. 

The challenge of interpretation is, with the help of the Holy Spirit, to find ways those biblical particularities might intersect with the details of our own lives. For example, for some 21st-century Christians it could be important to consider whether their own power and status in the world are reflected in the experience of the Egyptians in the story, more than in that of the Israelites. Or readers might consider the way Pharaoh’s speech, strategy, and actions compare and contrast with the imperial leaders of Jesus’s era and with other tyrannical leaders through history. Acknowledging the contextual differences between the biblical stories and our own social location can be as important as mapping similarities. 

3. Emphasize that God’s love may be universal, but it is not neutral. God is never a neutral observer in any biblical account; God always takes sides. In the exodus story, God chooses to liberate the Israelites from Egyptian bondage. God has no patience for Pharaoh’s delusions of godly grandeur, nor for his vicious grasping at power and glory. Similarly, Jesus’s death on the cross is no affirmation of the Roman Empire, but rather an indictment of its cruelty. Jesus’s resurrection may not overthrow the Roman Empire, but it certainly exposes its ultimate impotence and the farce of its claims to absolute dominance. 

Throughout Scripture, from Exodus to the Gospels and everything between and beyond, God sides with life over death and humility over power. 

4. Show them that Scripture, in all its diversity, affirms God’s activity in the world. The nature and purposes of God’s activity in the world are perpetual mysteries to us. The big questions about the justice of God and the persistence of suffering are not (at least from where I sit) answerable in this life. But the deliverance of the Israelites and the resurrection of Jesus share a testimony that God was, is, and will continue to be an active force in the world. 

This point is emphasized in the last two verses of this week’s reading: “Thus the LORD saved Israel that day from the Egyptians; and Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore. Israel saw the great work that the LORD did against the Egyptians. So the people feared the LORD and believed in the LORD and his servant Moses” (Exodus 14:30–31). 

By observing God’s victory at the Sea, people come to know God. By observing Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, people come to know God. We may see only “in a mirror, dimly” (1 Corinthians 13:12, New King James Version), but through the witness of the entirety of Scripture, we, too, learn to observe God’s activity in the world.