Talking about the Exodus from Egypt, the first thing that comes to mind is the “miracle,” the splitting of the sea that allowed the children of Israel to cross on dry land.

The popular mind calls these kinds of seeming intrusions in the natural order events that interrupt the cause-and-effect chain “miracles.” And, though the TaNaKh intends to report that something unexpected happened at the “Sea of Reeds,” Israel’s foundational literature does not speak of a miracle. Its concern is not so much with what happened but the reaction it was intended to cause.

For the TaNaKh, the word “wondrous”- the word it uses to refer to the positive unforeseen- is a sign intended to call attention beyond what is being seen or experienced.

Bible professor Brevard S. Childs wrote that Deliverance at the Sea “was affected by a combination of the wonderful and the ordinary. The waters were split by Moses’ rod, but a strong wind blew all night and laid the sea bed bare. The waters stood up as a mighty wall to the left and the right, and yet the Egyptians were drowned when the sea returned to its normal channels… it was the sea bottom mud clogged the wheels of the heavy chariots.”

 “There never was a time when the event was only understood as ordinary, nor was there a time when the supernatural absorbed the natural. But Israel saw the mighty hand of God at work in both the ordinary and the wonderful,” adds Professor Childs.

For Israel, there are no “everyday” matters. Nothing in the world is unspectacular; there are no entitlements, and everything begs not to be taken for granted. This acknowledgment is expressed with gratitude, conventionally expressed as bowing down and bending the knee.

The Hebrew word for the knee is “berech,” and from there derives the word “beracha,” awkwardly translated as “blessing,” something that requires gratitude- bending of the knee. Every waking up in the morning, every morsel of food eaten, has the Jew pronounce a beracha. Every passage in life-from, birth to death- every recovering from illness or accident, has a Jew pronounce a beracha

To paraphrase Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Jews do not keep their faith because of the miracles they experience. It is their faith that leads them to interpret their life as miraculous.

Jack Miles, a professor of Religious Studies at UC Irvine, correctly points out that

“The Exodus is neither an Israelite victory nor an Egyptian defeat; the Exodus is an act of God.”

Unsurprisingly then, in the words of Yale University professor Brevard Childs, the book of Exodus makes much use of the miraculous as a varied and subtle medium. This material’s theological function acts as a check against its misuse in the form of either rationalism on the left or supernaturalism on the right.

Indeed, the deliverance at the sea was affected by a combination of the wonderful and the ordinary. The Israelites are not, after all, magically transported to the promised land; they must march to get there, and the march is full of difficulties, crises, and struggles, all realistically presented.

The waters were split by the rod of Moses, but a strong wind blew all night and laid bare the seabed. The waters stood up as a mighty wall to the left and the right, yet the Egyptians were drowned when the sea returned to its normal channels.

Harvard professor and one of America’s preeminent theologians, Harvey Cox, contends that for the Hebrews, God spoke decisively not in a natural phenomenon, such as a thunderclap or an earthquake, but through a historical event, the deliverance from Egypt. Significantly, this was an event of social change, a massive act of what we might call today “civil disobedience.” It was an insurrection against a duly constituted monarch, a pharaoh whose relationship to the sun- -god Re constituted his claim to political sovereignty. There had no doubt been similar escapes before, but the Exodus of the Hebrews became more than a minor event that happened to an unimportant people. It became the central event around which the Hebrews organized their whole perception of reality.