Exodus15chapter 15

With loving devotion You will lead the people: Adam Clarke reads verses 13 to 18 as a prediction of what God would yet do for the people He had redeemed, and he would put several verbs in the future. The Berean reads You will lead and You will guide. Loving devotion renders the Hebrew chesed, the loyal love God keeps toward His people.

Exodus 15:14-16

The song looks forward and names four peoples in the order they sit along the road to Canaan, Palestina, Edom, Moab and the inhabitants of Canaan. Forty years later Rahab says this back to the spies at Joshua 2:9 to 11, that terror is fallen upon us and our hearts did melt, and she names hearing about the Red sea as the cause. Verse 16 calls the people purchased, a word Genesis used of Abraham buying a burial field at 25:10, so the deliverance is described as a purchase and not only a rescue.

the chiefs of Edom will be dismayed: Adam Clarke notes that Edom was then ruled by chiefs, the alluphim, the title Genesis 36:15 gives the heads of the clans descended from Esau. Moab's part came true at Numbers 22:3, where Moab was terrified of the people and dreaded the Israelites. The song names the leaders before the peoples.

until Your people pass by: Adam Clarke takes the passing by as the march through the desert and over the Jordan into the land still ahead. Joshua 3:17 records all Israel crossing the Jordan on dry ground while the priests stood firm. Still as a stone takes up the stone of verse 5.

The word Sanctuary occurs here for the first time in Scripture, ten chapters before God tells Moses to make one at 25:8. Israel is standing on a beach with a wilderness in front of it, and the song is already describing a settled house with God dwelling in it. Planting is a fixed image chosen for people who at this hour own nothing beyond what they carried out of Egypt.

Exodus 15:18-19

This is the first place Scripture says that God reigns, and it is said by former slaves about the God who has just drowned the only king they had ever served. Revelation 11:15 puts the same words at the end of the Bible, that he shall reign for ever and ever. Verse 19 steps out of the poetry and restates the plain fact underneath it, that the horse of Pharaoh went into the sea and the children of Israel went on dry land in the midst of the sea.

For when Pharaoh’s horses, chariots, and horsemen went into the sea: The verse opens with For and gives the reason for the singing on both sides of it, the song of Moses before and Miriam's answer after. Albert Barnes holds that the text itself dates the song to the hour the sea closed over Pharaoh's chariots and horsemen. Its last clause repeats 14:29 nearly word for word.

Exodus 15:20-21

Miriam is the first woman in Scripture called a prophetess, and the word next falls on Deborah at Judges 4:4. She is named the sister of Aaron rather than the sister of Moses, and the text gives no reason for it. The timbrel enters the Bible here as well, and Jephthah's daughter will come out to meet her father with timbrels and dances at Judges 11:34. Miriam answers the men with the opening words of verse 1, and the word triumphed occurs twice in the whole Bible, in her line and in his.

And Miriam sang back to them: The pronoun them is masculine in Hebrew, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read it as Miriam answering the men. Moses led the men and Miriam the women, the two companies taking the song to the LORD in turn. Her line, sing to the LORD, makes verse 1 the chorus.

Exodus 15:22-23

Three days out of the water and there is no water, which is the whole distance between the song and the complaint that follows it. Marah means bitter, so the first stop after the sea is a disappointment that gets named for what was wrong with it. The wilderness of Shur is the same country Genesis 16:7 put Hagar in when she ran from Sarai, where the angel of the LORD found an Egyptian slave woman by a fountain on the way to Shur.

they could not drink the water there because it was bitter: Albert Barnes identifies Marah with the spring of Huwara, which rises from a whitish mound laid down by its own water. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown report it still bitter in their day. They add that Arabs seldom let their camels drink from it.

The word murmured occurs here for the first time in Scripture, three days after the first song. It comes twice more before Sinai, at 16:2 and at 17:3, and then at Numbers 14:2 where the same complaint meets a different answer. In Exodus God answers every murmur with water, bread, meat or a dry road, and at Kadesh the murmuring costs a whole generation the land.

Moses cries and is shown a tree, and the tree cast into the water is what changes the water, so the remedy goes into the bitterness rather than around it. The phrase a statute and an ordinance occurs here for the first time, before Sinai and before any law has been given. The verse ends by saying he proved them, which makes the bitter water a test as well as a need. Matthew Henry and other older writers read the tree as a figure of the cross, and that reading rests on their names rather than on any New Testament statement.

The word healeth occurs here for the first time in Scripture and the whole Bible uses it four times, here and at Psalm 103:3, Psalm 147:3 and Isaiah 30:26. It answers the second of the three signs God gave Moses at the bush, the hand made leprous and made whole again at 4:6 and 4:7, which is the one sign of the three that never gets a scene of its own. The diseases named are Egypt's, so the promise is measured against the country they left rather than against sickness at large.

Twelve wells and threescore and ten palm trees, and Numbers 33:9 records the same stop with the same two counts. Matthew Henry and other commentators read the numbers against the twelve tribes and the seventy souls who went down into Egypt at Genesis 46:27, and the text itself draws neither line. The chapter that opened with a song closes with an encampment beside water, one stage past the place where there was none.