Canter Bridge

Moses and Miryam each snag space for a song in Exodus 15. Staggering forward from the violent salvation of the Yam Suf (the ‘Sea of Reeds’), the screams of drowning Egyptians still clinging to them like smoke to a survivor’s clothes, the escaped Hebrew slaves sing.

And how! Moses and Miryam’s songs erupt in gratitude. More than a hint of Schadenfreude quickens the beat. Moses imagines the whole earth looking in on the scene, cowering in fear before the emergence of a God-favored people:

The peoples heard, they trembled;
pangs seized the inhabitants of Philistia.
Then the chiefs of Edom were dismayed;
trembling seized the leaders of Moab;
all the inhabitants of Canaan melted away.
Terror and dread fell upon them;
by the might of your arm, they became still as a stone
until your people, O LORD, passed by,
until the people whom you acquired passed by.

Miryam grabs a tambourine and dances. The ‘daughters of Israel’ follow her. All becomes motion and song, a celebration of thanksgiving by dancers who cannot forget how—a mere moment ago—all seemed lost, trapped between Egyptian charioteers and the impassable waters. Salvation’s song, when it is sung this loudly, often hides in its shadows pockets of frenzy, of excess, of love, of feasting. When all the daughters of a nation dance, the menfolk rarely sit still.

Biblical scholars find in the archaic Hebrew of songs like these—and Deborah’s song, over in Judges 5—some of the Hebrew Bible’s earliest words. Generations sing them, for they have come to sound both quaint and powerful, without updating the language of an earlier time. They revel in accents and syllables whose oddness accrues a kind of authority that brings YHWH’s action in that old day into this moment, this now, this here.

How strange, then, that the murmuring of Exodus 16 follows upon the song and dance of the chapter that is its precursor. Suddenly, Israel’s sons and daughters pronounce YHWH’s name not in gratitude but in the bitter words of fear’s resentment. One wonders if the dance seemed ridiculous and premature on a virtual morning after, thick with disappointment.

The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The Israelites said to them, ‘If only we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.’

The freefall from salvation’s song to bitter murmuring is a trajectory that is familiar to readers of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Alas, its fluid, downhill architecture figures prominently in the growing edifice that is Israel. Arches, balustrades, and rubble are made of the same stuff.

In the New Testament, too, despondency’s projection of harmful intent upon ‘those who brought us here’ is all too evident. The quantity of apostolic words written to counter gossip and murmuring identify these habits as more than hypothetical threats to a community’s well-being.

Cymbals rang while Miryam and her sisters dances.

A different, clashing sound came all too soon. Salvation’s song is too often a prelude.