A few weeks ago, as Easter was upon us, myriad movie channels dug out that chestnut “The Ten Commandments.” In my childhood it was a cinematographic wonder with Charlton Heston outperforming everyone and everything including a sea being ripped apart. I would like to look upon that event more seriously, and briefly consider that sea of change that took a tribal macedoine and made it into a nation. In my accustomed translation of scripture (NRSV) chapter 14 is dubbed “Crossing the Red Sea.” Was it the Red Sea? The vast majority of scholars say no. Even some modern translations call it the Sea of Reeds. First, despite that which for centuries we were told, the Hebrew of that scripture is accurately translated not red but reeds. Second, while there are marshy areas around the Red Sea, it is debated as to exactly which of these was the crossing point. Bolstering the notion of a marsh rather than a sea is the mention of an east wind. In his campaign against Carthage Scipio was aided by a strong east wind that dried the marshes around the city and allowed his troops to advance. Thus, there is evidence a strong east wind can make a marsh hastily passable. On the other hand, the wind required to blast open a sea would have hurled both the Israelites and the Egyptians across the plain. A wall of water to the right and to the left is a dramatic way of expressing the profundity of the experience.
There are some scholars who opine the sea crossing is actually a foredating retelling the crossing of the Jordon river under the leadership of Joshua a generation later. This idea relies upon the story that the tribes crossed the Jordon dry shod. The flow of the river could have been diverted to an underground channel for several hours resultant of an earthquake or landslide in the area. There does exist the possibility of such an event. The extraordinary fortuitousness of the occurrence as the Israelites were beginning their entry into Canaan was sufficiently impressive that the psyche created the retrospective story of how the entire venture of exodus began. It is an idea that carries merit. However, while it deflates the power the sea crossing holds in the collective and liturgical memory of Israel, it does not necessarily negate it.
There is also the issue of the number of people involved. Chapter 12 lists that as 600,000 men plus women and children. That would make the total number of fleeing about two million, all of whom would need to be sustained in the desert. The total population of Egypt at this time is estimated to be—at maximum—five million. According to some scholars “thousand” ought to translated “clans.” This still gives us a considerable number. There is also to be considered the usage of numbers as symbols in ancient literature. A thousand here is equivalent to our saying a million as a symbol-number for a great many. Six is one number less than the ideal (seven). Thus, it could be taken as a way of saying Israel was a substantial number but less than ideal. It is a message: power is not in numbers but in God. Number here is transformed from a counting of heads into a sign of the saving power of God, a theme that runs throughout scripture. We need look only as far as chapter 15. It is a song of praise to the Lord who is the victorious and mighty warrior. Note also it was to underscore deliverance and victory are always by God’s power that the Ark was carried into battle. Consider also the tales of Gideon (Judges 7), David ( I Samuel 17; 2 Samuel 5), and of the prophets who consistently called for non-action in the face of foreign threats. Victory is not by the size of an army or the cunning diplomacy of men; it is by God’s hand. Scripture is a testament to the sovereignty and absolute power of God, and not a scientific record of events. We do not continue to read it because it is history, but because it is revelatory of God and God’s plan, and because it is in that inspirational, spirit building. This sacred narrative holds value because it founds the identity of a nation, and of two communities of faith. It rehearses a profound psychological/spiritual experience. All that duly noted, scholars are of a mind that the number who left Egypt were at most a few thousand.
Nascent Israel was an enslaved people. A prophet came to them with a message of hope. The God of their ancestors willed them to become a nation chosen from among all the nations that they might serve him. God would deliver them from bondage to Egypt, and bind them to himself. It was a rallying cry. They fell in line, and having eaten “the bread of haste,” the unleavened, they fled. Egypt pursued. They panicked. They were trapped. The path before them was marsh. The path behind was an army set on captivity and undoubtedly not a few exemplary executions. Suddenly come clouds, lightening, wind, and a path forward opens before them. Their sheer terror is transformed in the course of a night into unbelievable deliverance. They are, as it were, in the mouth of the lion when suddenly lightening strikes the beast and it dies. The trauma is imprinted in the psyche of a people, and it transforms them into an embryonic nation. It is a birth experience. Look at the symbols: parting waters, delivery. Its perpetual remembrance cements an identity. But this is cultic. It reaches beyond the biology of a set group. It is an act of God, and so it speaks to the soul, the psyche, of humankind. It is in this capacity that it becomes open to be a story of deliverance from dark powers within to enlightenment, from sin to salvation. It thus is open (free) to become a symbol of new life through the waters of baptism.
The language of psyche is not made up of a differentiated vocabulary. Psyche is an amassment of powers interacting with one another. There is, however, an overall thrust, and in that a simplicity of direction. Its goal is integration of life into the full harmony of an individual person and that person into world. The vital need for psychic harmony itself attests to a myriad of voices within vying to be heard, and needing to be orchestrated. The call of solitude and its transcendence grapples with the evocation to sociality and world engagement. Logic and creativity are wont to scoff one at the other. Powers of urge, instinct, sense, feeling, intuition, intellection, and will need each to have their voices heard. The cold and dark of the not created tremble under a brilliance yet to become light. It is a life-journey towards wholeness. And like that sea crossing, its ultimate outcome is in the hands, in the power of the Creator whose print and pulse cannot be erased from creation.
Scripture tells us we can strive to be perfect, whole, and good, but in the end we cannot. We fall prey to blind spots within. We become entrapped in the subtilties of a world of expectations. We get lost in any number of masks and made-for-the-occasion personalities—all of them variations on a world-navigating ego secretly seeking its own continuance, its own forevermore. But scripture also tells us there is more to us than all this. There is at the very core of us an image of pure creativity capable of sheering its way through all this psychic background noise, integrating it, harmonizing it, and moving it forward into the truth of soul, its God-givenness. Call it grace, or the abiding image of the creating God within, or the fundamental structure of the psyche; the reality is one. It is its naming alone that is in question. The issue is learning to still the world-necessary ego that the roaring sea within is tamed. Peter wanted to walk the storm waters, but he could not; it took the hand of God to hold him (Matthew 14.) The creative light has its path, the creative breath its berth. The harmony and wholeness we strive to make holds, supports, leads, and creates us.
Walls of water to the right and to the left record not a physical reality but a psychological fact, an experiential reality—deliverance. In this it speaks of the notion of deliverance itself. Thus it becomes deliverance from the ultimate disorder and danger: the chaos of sin, the unknown of death. In this it opens up a groundwork for creation, for re-creation. The sea is an ancient symbol of chaos. Its vastness and untamedness are terrifying. It pauses us. God alone can cut through it, and in the tale here considered lead us through it. Where? Israel is told it is into a land of promise, a land flowing with the blessings of sustenance and comfort (milk and honey), identity and happiness. Yet that place is found only through a desert wherein a covenant is affirmed. Here, in the solitude of an alone-place one makes a bonding of the human will to the divine will, of, if you will, a sub-mission of ego powers to the power of the psychic core.
The exodus is rehearsed, is relevant, only because it is a truth of soul wrapped in the symbols of the soul’s life. We are delivered from the chaos and disorder sin creates within the soul only by the grace and hand of God. And while that may bring relief and even joy, it is not an end. It is the beginning of a journey. The desert is the alone-place, a no-man’s land, the ground of testing, of formation. The fullness of the promise, the promised-land, lies beyond the conquest of old habits and lures. Again and again the message is pounded out. It is not by human cunning or device that salvation, that wholeness comes, but by a power working within us and through us that is beyond the grasp of ego. It is in relaxing the grip of ego over life that that power can manifest itself in the act of individuation and integration into world. To rest in God, to relax into the reality of the grace of creation within, into the image of God within, into the primal thrust of creativity within, alone allows the ever-creating God hidden within to emerge and be known—to self and world. It is that trust, that falling into faith, which allows even the ultimate darkness, death, to move from the resignation of numbing fear to a hope which is none other than love’s transforming gaze.