Summarising chapter 14

The deliverance at the Red Sea (Ex 14) took place without any human assistance.  It has been argued that God would always have preferred to work that way, if only his people had trusted him.  But does God ever need to resort to violence?

The author of the narrative certainly thought that it was Yahweh, ‘a man of war’ (Ex 15:1), who drowned Pharaoh’s army in the sea.  But our cross-centred hermeneutic determines that we should see this ascription of divine violence to the writer’s fallen and culturally conditioned thinking.  Rather, we should see destructive cosmic agents at work.

According to Paul Hanson, the author of Ex 15 has utilised a common ANE conflict-with-chaos motif as a framework for telling the story.  The parting and closing of the Red Sea becomes a re-enactment of Yahweh’s battle with the anti-creational force he overcame at the time of the creation of the world.

Most of the biblical writers who refer back to the parting of the Red Sea do so in terms of a battle against dustructive cosmic forces.  See Psa 74:13-17; 77:15–16, 19–20; 114; Isa 51:9f.

Hab 3:15 ‘But you trample on the sea [yam] with your horses, on the surging, raging waters.’  The word yam is also the name of a Canaanite deity associated with chaos.

It was, then, cosmic destructive forces, understood as the sea monster who destroyed Pharoah’s army.  God restrained the forces in order to deliver the Israelites, and then withdrew his restraint, allowing the waters to fall back and drown the pursuing army:

‘With a grieving heart, God was once again allowing evil to vanquish evil as a steppingstone to his ultimate Aikido victory over evil on the cross.’

Scripture elsewhere clarifies that:

‘It wasn’t Yahweh who drowned Pharaoh’s soldiers, it was the one known as “Leviathan,” “Rahab,” “Yam,” and “the monster of the sea.” And this is the same cosmic beast that would later come to be identified as “Satan” and other “spiritual forces of evil” (Eph 6:12). In fact, it is the same violent beast that we earlier saw Paul identify as “the destroying angel” (1 Cor 10:10).’

[Note: all of this is dealing with the narrative as it stands.  According to Boyd, we have no way of knowing what actually happened historically.  It is the narrative, not the history behind it, that is divinely inspired.]

The biblical authors sometimes viewed Pharaoh and/or Egypt as an anti-creational cosmic monster.  The Red Sea incident then becomes a story of one such monster defeating another.  The cosmic foe who had boasted that he would gorge himself on the Israelites is himself swallowed up (Ex 15:9,12).

The same pattern can already be seen in Aaron’s spernatural serpent swallowing up Pharoah’s supernatural serpents (Ex 7:8-13).  (See also Ex 15:12, where it is ‘the earth’ which swallows Yahweh’s enemy).  The word for ‘serpent’ in Ex 7:12 is not the usual word: it could be translated ‘dragon’ or ‘monster’.  It is the same word used for the anti-creational monster of Ps 74:13 and Isa 51:9.

Furthermore, we should understand the plagues as a gradually-intensifying process of the undoing of creation, as

‘Water is no longer simply water; light and darkness are no longer separate; diseases of people and animals run amok; insects and amphibians swarm out of control.’ (Fretheim)

The destructive forces behind the plagues are mentioned in Ps 78:49.

‘So while the author of the Exodus narrative believes he is exalting Yahweh by attributing the violence involved in each plague to him, these passages provide further confirmation that Yahweh merely permitted a band of cosmic agents that were already bent on destruction to do what they wanted to do. And the one on which they are allowed to carry out their violence is Egypt, itself identified as a cosmic monster.’

Ex 12:23 informs us that Yahweh’s conflict was not just with Egypt, but with the gods of Egypt.  And we can understand each of the plagues to be an assault on one or other of these gods:

‘For example, when the Nile was turned into blood, this can be understood to represent a victory over Hapi, the god of the Nile, or Khrum, the guardian of the source of the Nile, or Osiris, for the Nile was said to be his bloodstream.’

So, God allowed one evil cosmic force (the Nile) to swallow another evil cosmic force (Egypt, Pharaoh).

We must understand God’s heart to have been grieving, even as the Egptians were being destroyed.  And this points us back to the cross.  What we must not do is to assume that their physical destruction means that they are eternally lost.  For love ‘always hopes’ (cf. 1 Cor 5:5; 13:6).