The Message of Psalm 114

A. Berlin – Paul FS 1

“The Message of Psalm 114.” In Birkat Shalom: Studies in the Bible, Ancient Near

Eastern Literature, and Post-Biblical Judaism Presented to Shalom M. Paul on

the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday. Edited by Chaim Cohen, et al. Winona

Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2008. Pp. 345-361.

The Message of Psalm 114

Adele Berlin

It is with pleasure that I dedicate this interpretation of Psalm 114 to my teacher

and colleague, Shalom Paul, who was among the first to reveal to me the delights of

studying biblical literature.

Because scholars generally seek a ritual or cultic occasion to account for the

origin and use of psalms, and because the exodus is prominent in Psalm 114, some

scholars concluded that the psalm was written as part of a liturgy for the celebration of

Passover.1 But the psalm does not celebrate the exodus per se, nor does it mention the

events leading up to it, like the plagues or the Passover itself. In fact, the psalm has more

to say about the events following the exodus—the crossing of the Reed Sea and the

provisioning of water in the wilderness—than about the actual departure from Egypt. So

the celebration of Passover is not likely to have given rise to this psalm. Moreover,

though usually considered a psalm of praise, Psalm 114 is untypical of that genre. The

psalm is not addressed to God and does not glorify his past acts. Only in the penultimate

verse (v.7) is God’s name mentioned and only in that verse is praise of God implied. I

1 For example, Kraus, 372. Other scholars tie the psalm more generally to the festivals,

without specifying Passover (Clifford, 191). An alternate Sitz im Leben, the

enthronement ceremony of God, is now generally dismissed.


will argue that Psalm 114 is best understood as a message to an exilic or postexilic

audience about an event in their own time, the return from exile. This is the main point of

the psalm, albeit this point is not explicitly voiced. Even if we assume that the psalm was

used liturgically, we should remember that while the implied audience of prayers is God,

the real audience is the praying community. To be meaningful, prayers must reflect the

ideology and values of the community. At the same time, they strengthen the beliefs of

those praying, confirming their view of the world and their place in it. Prayers are

ideological discourses.2

The dating of this psalm, like most, is notoriously difficult and contentious. Along

with other scholars, I date it to the Exilic or early Postexilic period.3 Our psalm shares

language and ideas with Second Isaiah, reinforcing the sense that it is addressing the

situation in the late Neo-Babylonian or early Persian period, on the brink of, or shortly

after, the return from exile. Furthermore, the allusions to Torah texts, most clearly

Exodus 15 and 19 and miscellaneous phrases in Deuteronomy, suggests that the Torah

had already achieved some measure of authoritative status by the time of our psalmist,

making it “quotable,” to an audience able to appreciate the allusions. Finally, in

2 See Newsom, especially pp. 191-286, for a brilliant analysis of the role of the Hodayot

in forming and strengthening the identity of the community at Qumran.

3 Prinsloo, “Tremble before the Lord,” 307-309 summarizes various earlier positions

regarding the date and social setting and concludes that it is postexilic (321).

Gerstenberger, 282 and 284, declares it late exilic-postexilic.


somewhat of a hermeneutic circle, the psalm’s implicit message, as I understand it, fits

best in a late exilic or postexilic setting.

But before we get to the implicit message, let us see what the psalm makes

explicit. There was an event in the past, says this psalm, of such cosmic proportions that

it turned the world upside down; indeed, it caused the world to be re-created.4 That

cataclysmic event was the birth of Israel as a nation in its land. It was not for Israel alone

that this event was momentous; in fact, the psalm says little about its effect on Israel.

Rather, the entire physical world was affected by it. It was a cosmic event, on a par with

the creation of the world.

I will comment on how specific phrases work to convey this message, with

special emphasis on the range of associations these phrases evoke. At the same time, I

will develop my argument that the point of the psalm is not to commemorate the exodus

from Egypt but to celebrate the new exodus, the return from exile. Towards this end, I

will point out how the psalm moves from past time to present time and how similar its

language and themes are to Second Isaiah.

1. When Israel came out from Egypt,

The House of Jacob from a strange-speaking people,

2. Judah became His holy one,

Israel his dominion.

4 Cf. Geller, 186: “The formation of Israel . . . is to be viewed as a new act of divine

creation.” Geller, 187: “Israel is a new creation, its formation a culminating divine act

equivalent to the establishment of the cosmos.” See also Weiss, The Bible from Within,

374.


Verse 1 is a subordinate clause that provides the temporal setting for the main clause in v.

2; when Israel came out from Egypt, something happened. The emphasis is not on the

exodus per se (the subordinate clause) but on the main clause, what happened as a result

of the exodus, that Israel became a nation in its land, and became God’s holy possession.

That the exodus culminated in the birth of Israel as a nation, meaning Israel’s

establishment as a kingdom with a temple, is not an idea invented by our psalmist. Exod

15:16-17, a passage which our psalmist called upon, says: “You brought them and

planted them in your mountain-possession . . . the sanctuary . . . which you have

established.” (Cf. also Exod 6:68 and Ps 78:65-68). Psalm 74:2 likewise calls upon this

sequence in Exodus 15, even more overtly, when it says

ם ד זכר עדתך קנית ק

ט ב ך גאלת ש נחלת

ה שכנת בו -הר ציון ז

Remember the congregation you acquired in a past age,

Which you redeemed as your tribe of inheritance,

Mount Zion, where you dwell.

Psalm 95, with a slightly different twist, also contains a “creation” passage in vv.

4-5, followed by an exodus passage consisting only of the mention of the rebellions

against God in the wilderness at Meribah and Massah, and the threat that those who

rebelled would not be allowed to “come to my resting-place (מנוחתי).” The Deuteronomic

term “resting-place” (Deut 12:9-11, 1 Kings 8:56) can mean the land of Israel and/or the

temple (the latter sense more common in postexilic literature, as in Ps 132:8, 14, Isa 66:1,

1 Chr 28:2). Whether one interprets the term as referring specifically to the temple, or

more generally to land of Israel, the idea in the exodus-wanderings-settlement-temple


sequence is that beginning with the exodus, God established his nation in its land over

which God rules. God’s throne, the seat of his rule, is the temple.5

A strange-speaking people. The foreignness of Egypt is marked by their strange

language.6 See also Deut 28:49, Isa 33:19, and Jer 5:15 where the unintelligibility (that is,

the difference) of the language marks the foreign enemy as alien. Significant for my

thesis, the references in Deuteronomy and Jeremiah hint at the Babylonian exile, the

“Egypt” of the postexilic “exodus” that I see as the subtext of this psalm.

Verse 2. Judah became His holy one, Israel His dominion. This, the main

clause of the verse, is the main focus of the psalm, the event that caused the reaction of

the whole world. The verse is generally understood as one phrase, broken up in order to

construct the parallelism: Judah and Israel became His holy kingdom(s).

The concept of Israel as a holy nation derives, as many have noted, from Exod

19:6: “You shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” This means that Israel

lives in God’s presence and has access to God, implying the existence of the temple.

Deuteronomy reiterates the idea of Israel’s holiness in the context of settling in the

promised land (Deut 26:18-19, 28:9-10; see also Deut 14:2, 26; 32:8-9). Jer 2:3,

comparing Israel to an offering reserved for God, also suggests that Israel’s holiness

(being set aside exclusively for God) emanates from the exodus.

5 Lam 5:19, faced with the destruction of the temple, takes the theology to the next step,

proclaiming that God’s throne (= God’s sovereignty) exists forever despite the

destruction of the temple.

6 Geller, 191-194, includes a discussion of possible associations that this term may have

evoked.


The word ממשלה, “dominion, kingdom,” points to a geopolitical entity, a nation in

a land, as does the composite Judah-Israel, the united kingdom, which is God’s holy

kingdom = a kingdom belonging to and ruled by God.7

His holy one. While generally understood to mean “his holy one”—God’s holy

possession (=the people and/or the land), another interpretation takes לקדשו as God’s holy

place, his “sanctuary,”8 suggesting that Judah was, already at the exodus, assigned to be

the location of God’s temple. The verse would then mean: “Judah became his holy place

(the site of his temple); Israel his dominion,” meaning that the land of Israel became

God’s dominion with the seat of his rule in Zion. These two ways of rendering לקדשו are

conceptually very close: that the birth of the nation begun at the exodus culminated in the

ideal Israelite kingdom under God’s rule (that is, with its religious capital in Jerusalem).

That the existence of the temple is the sign of God’s rule over Israel is clear from Isa

63:18-19:

צער ירשו עם ך צרינו בוססו למ ך. קדש קדש מ

ם נקרא לא משלת בם היינו מעולם לא מך עליה ש

7 Geller takes this as pre-Israelite Canaan, but it is hard to imagine God’s domain separate

from His people.

8 So Hakham, Allen, Kraus, Gerstenberger, and NRSV. Gerstenberger, 282, then says that

the “congregation itself is . . . the ‘sanctuary’ of God.”


“For a little while your holy people possessed it, but our foes have trampled your

sanctuary. We have become as if you never ruled over us; your name was not proclaimed

over us.”9

A similar picture of the ideal kingdom of Israel with the temple in Zion (also

using the Judah-Israel parallelism) is portrayed in Ps 76: 2-3:

God made himself known in Judah;

in Israel his name is great.

Salem became his booth;

and his dwelling-place in Zion.

A few verses later (76:7) comes an allusion to the exodus, mixed with the creation motif:

“At your rebuke (גער), God of Jacob, chariot-driver and horse lay stunned.” The word גער,

“blast” or “rebuke,” is not exodus-language but harks back to God’s defeat of chaos (Isa

17:13, Nah 1:4, Ps 18:16, 104:7, Job 26:11), but it is also used in Ps 106:9 in an exodus

connection where the battle against Pharaoh is likened to the cosmic battle against the

waters of chaos. Or, as Exod 15:5 has it, Pharaoh is consigned to the waters of chaos.10

Indeed, Psalm 114’s combination of creation and exodus imagery reverberates in other

psalms.

Judah // Israel. The psalm is invoking the concept of the united monarchy, or

better, the ideal kingdom of Israel, which it views as incipient in the exodus, exactly as

Exod 15:17 does. The bipartite terminology, Judah and Israel, is found in texts describing

9 On the idiom of God’s name being proclaimed over Israel as a synonym for God’s

ruling over Israel, which also occurs in Deuteronomy, see Amarna Letter #287 [ANET,

488], line 60: Behold, the king has set his name in the land of Jerusalem for ever; so he

cannot abandon the lands of Jerusalem.”

10 See Hossfeld and Zenger, 269.


these geographic areas before the divided monarchy, and even before the establishment

of the monarchy (Josh 11:21, 1 Sam 11:8). The term represents the ideal Israelite

kingdom, an ideal that is read back into earlier times and that continues to be an ideal

after the destruction of both kingdoms.11

The placing of Judah before Israel may seem unusual, but it is not, especially in

late biblical literature (Ezek 27:17; 37:15, Ps 76:2l and also 1 Kings 4:20 and 5:5).

3. The Sea saw and ran away,

The Jordan turned back,

4. The mountains jumped like rams,

The hills like sheep.

5. What’s the matter, Sea, that you run away?

Jordan, that you turn back?

6. Mountains, that you jump like rams?

Hills, like sheep?

The psalm achieves a nexus between exodus and creation by combining the motif

of creation with the motif of the exodus and its aftermath. Common imagery drawn from

both is melded together, so that creation and exodus become fused. The sea that was

restrained in the exodus is the sea that God restrained in the creation of the world. The

mountains that react to the exodus are the mountains that signify the created world as

fixed in place by God. Further along in the psalm, the re-arranging of land and water is

replayed on a smaller scale, when rock is turned into water. By equating the creation and

11 Geller, 182, notes that “reference need not be to the discrete kingdoms of Israel and

Judah after the split of 922 BCE. The united monarchy which preceded it was dual; and

the dichotomy of Judah and Israel in the unity of Pan-Israel is a biblical ideal as well as a

historical reality.”


the exodus, the psalm makes its point that the exodus is a (re-)creation of the world.

Israel’s birth as a nation and its settlement in its land has changed the world order.

The sea . . . the Jordan. The personified waters, like the personified mountains

and hills that follow, react to the birth of Israel. The path made for the Israelites through

the Reed Sea (Exod 14:21-29) and through the Jordan River (Joshua 3-4) frame the exit

from Egypt and the entrance to Canaan (Josh 4:23; see Ps 66:6). Between these events is

the wandering in the wilderness, alluded to in v. 8. The parallelism of “sea // Jordan” also

suggests the mythic parallelism of the primordial cosmic waters, “sea // river,” (Ps 24:2,

66:6, 72:8, 89:25 and in the Ugaritic Baal Epic), the waters subdued and restrained at

creation (Ps 74:12-14, 89:10-11). By identifying the Reed Sea and the Jordan with the

cosmic waters, the psalm reads the exodus as a replay of the creation, as do Exodus 15

and several other psalmic and Isaianic passages.

Ran away.” This word does not occur in connection with the Reed Sea but“ ,וינס

is used in creation imagery, as in Ps 104:7, where the primordial waters flee from God’s

blast of thunder. In our psalm the waters flee on their own initiative, in reaction to having

seen the exodus.12

Mountains . . . hills (v.4). Mountains and hills are not associated with the

crossing of the Reed Sea or the Jordan. An ancient tradition, preserved in the Targum and

reiterated by David Kimchi and most modern scholars, sees the reference here to the

theophany at Mount Sinai: “the whole mountain trembled” (Exod 19:18). But, in

agreement with Meir Weiss, I am hard-pressed to see Mt. Sinai among the generalized

12 Weiss, The Bible from Within, 367.


mountains and hills described here.13 If a theophany is implied, it is not the revelation at

Sinai, but the presence of God manifest in the exodus and its aftermath. Yet our psalm

has not portrayed God as active in the exodus, at least until this point. (Verse 7 is more

theophanic; see my comment on it below.) More compelling, the sea did not see God, it

saw Israel leave Egypt. Verses 3-6 are better understood as simply the reaction of nature

to the birth of Israel.14 The point is not the effect on nature of a theophany, but the effect

of a cosmic event. The confusion arises because creation imagery and theophany imagery

are similar in that mountains quake and melt and thunder (Ps 77:17-19, 96:11-12, 97:5,

98:7-8). In other words, the natural world reacts to the appearance of God in ways similar

to nature’s reaction to the exodus in our psalm. Most like Ps 114:3 is Ps 29:6, which is a

theophany, where God made the Lebanon-Sirion (the most massive mountain range)

jump (רקד, as in our psalm, but in the הפעיל because God caused the movement). Only the

context can determine whether or not a theophany is depicted. The non-theophany of our

psalm may be appreciated by comparing Ps 77:16-21 in which there is a theophany at the

exodus: the waters see God (whereas in Psalm 114 they do not); God is very active and

powerful as he redeems Israel; there is rumbling, lightning, quaking, convulsing, pouring

rain as heaven, earth, and the waters of the deep (the three levels in the architecture of the

cosmos) witness the manifestation of God in the exodus.

Waters and mountains figure in our psalm because they represent the formation of

the world at creation, the very stuff that constitutes the created world. “The deep and the

springs of water, the mountains and the hills” is the way Prov 8:24-25 refers to the

13 Weiss, The Bible from Within, 366-368. 14 So Weiss, The Bible from Within, 371.


creation of the physical world. Ps 104:7-8 says: “They [the waters] fled at Your blast;

rushed away at the sound of Your thunder—mountains rising, valleys sinking—to the

place You established for them.” See also Ps 90:2, where mountains = world: “Before

mountains were born; (before) you conceived earth and the world.”

At the time of creation, the land’s geological features, represented by the

mountains, were fixed firmly in their place so that they would not move; they are

symbols of the earth’s permanence (Ps 104:5; in Isa 54:10 the moving of the mountains

means the end of the world.) But in our psalm the mountains are moving—not trembling

in a frightened reaction to the theophany but rather levitating, jumping or rearing up as

though no longer fixed in place—signaling the unmaking and remaking of the physical

world. In a contrasting image, Jer 4:24 pictures the mountains and hills quaking and

rocking at Israel’s destruction. In the preceding verse Jeremiah sees the earth become תהו

and light disappear from the sky. Jeremiah equates the destruction of Israel with a ובהו

return to chaos, the uncreating of the world. In our psalm, the moving mountains, along

with the unnatural flowing waters (“the sea saw and ran away”), form a more positive

picture of the creation replayed. If the destruction of Israel = a return to chaos, then the

birth of Israel = a rebirth of the world. Just so is the rebirth of Israel after the exile a

rebirth of the world.

Rams . . . Sheep. NJPS, alone among all the English translations I have

consulted, correctly renders בני צאן as “sheep,” not as “lambs.” There are not two types of

sheep pictured here (rams and lambs or rams and sheep); the parallelism is constructed

from an animal and its species, rams of the sheep species. For similar constructions see


Ps 29:6; 147:9, Prov 30:17.15 This is another example of one thought broken into two

parts in a parallelism (like v. 2). It means “the mountains and hills jumped like adult male

sheep.” Likewise, Ps 29:6, “God made the Lebanon-Sirion jump like a young wild ox.”

What is the movement of the mountains compared to? Not to a flock of sheep

gamboling and frolicking in a pasture, as some would have it. I interpret the image as the

mountains rearing up and prancing about as rams rear up and butt each other to establish

territory and mating choices. Rising mountains means the (re)formation of the mountains

at the creation, parallel to the altered flow of the waters in the preceding verse.

The rhetorical questions posed to the personified waters and land masses call

attention to the unnatural reaction of nature. Notice that the grammatical tense is no

longer perfect. The psalmist has put himself back into the time of the crossing of the

Reed Sea. Actually, the distinction between past and present is intentionally blurred, for

the past is being re-enacted in the present. The creation-exodus of long ago is happening

again now. (See the discussion on myth at the end of this essay for a more complete

explanation.)

What’s the matter. The question מה לך does not here express gloating over the

forces of chaos that have lost their battle against God, as quite a few commentators

15 I have written on this parallelism in a forthcoming paper titled “Rams and Lambs in

Psalm 114:4: The Septuagint’s Translation of X // בן Y Parallelisms” to appear in Textus.

For now see Hakham on this verse and TDOT 2: 152-153.


think.16 The “battle” aspect of the chaos myth is here absent, since the natural elements

react on their own volition, not through God’s force. And besides, the mountains are

never identified with the forces of chaos in the cosmic creation battle. As for the waters

of chaos, they have been de-vilified. They are not portrayed here as the enemies of God

to be defeated but rather as aspects of nature, like the mountains, that react in an

unnatural but positive way to the birth of Israel. The rhetorical questions simply register

the unnatural reaction of the waters and the mountains.17

7. In the presence of the Lord, quake, Earth,

In the presence of Jacob’s God,

8. Who turns the rock into a water-pool,

Flint into a water-spring.

In the presence of the Lord. Meir Weiss argues that this is not a theophany, and that

ה' מלפני should be rendered here as “on account of the Lord” and not “in the presence of

the Lord.”18 I am tempted to agree, as I agree with him about the absence of theophany

earlier in the poem. But here at the end of the poem something changes. God is

mentioned by name and as an active force (ההפכי, “the one who turns”). So a theophany

does seem to be meant here, although not the theophany at Sinai. These verses hint that

16 Based largely on the occurrence of a similar question in the Ugaritic Baal Epic. “O

Enemies of Hadd, why do you quake?” (Parker, Ugaritic Narrative Poetry, 137, lines 38-

39).

17 Compare God’s sympathetic inquiry to Hagar: מה לך הגר (Gen 21:17) and other

instances that do not convey mockery (Josh 15:18, Jud 18:24, 2 Sam 14:5).

18 Weiss, The Bible from Within, 372.


God was the cause behind the change in nature at the exodus, whereby rock turned into

water in the wilderness (note: not that water came out of the rock). More important, the

time frame is no longer in the past but is now tenseless—timeless (ההפכי is a participial

form), suggesting that the God who changed the natural world before will change it again.

As he provided water in the wilderness of the first exodus, so will he again provide it on

the trek through the wilderness from Babylonia to Judah (Isa 43:16-21 has a parallel

thought). The theophany is the appearance of God in the new exodus. (The word חיל,

appearing for the first time in our psalm in v. 7, occurs in many other theophany passages,

for example, Hab 3:10, Ps 77:17, 96:9, 97:5.)

Quake, Earth. The grammar of חולי is difficult; I accept the usual understanding:

imperative of 19.חיל/חול Does the imperative refer to the past, as if to say to the natural

world “You did well to react as you did”?20 Better, I think, to understand it as referring to

the present. The psalm is saying that the exodus of old is happening again, now, and that

the world that reacted to the first exodus (vv.1-3) is bidden to react again in the same

19 Lexicographers attempt to distinguish between חול, “to dance, whirl, reel” (TDOT

4:260-264) and חיל, “to writhe with labor pains, to tremble in fear” (TDOT 4:344-347).

Our psalm may be drawing on the connotations of both roots. The meaning “dance”

nicely parallels רקד in vv. 4 and 6, and it is probably the basic meaning. But at the same

time, since the topic is creation or birth (of the world and of the nation), the idea of the

earth writhing in childbirth also fits the picture. It is as if the earth is once again in the

throes of labor for the rebirth of the nation.

20 Hakham calls the imperative a “historical imperative,” indicating something that has

already happened.


manner or perhaps even a stronger manner now, at the new exodus, the return of Israel to

its land. For as the God of Jacob did in the prototypical mythic past, so will he once again

cause a major upheaval in the natural world for the sake of Israel.

Earth. Earlier represented by the sea and the mountains.21

God of Jacob. “The house of Jacob” (v. 1) forms an inclusio with “the God of

Jacob.” “Jacob” is used both for Israel in general, in earliest times, and also in later

literature to signify “Judah” or the Judean community, especially in Second Isaiah (Isa

41:8; 43:22, 28; 44:1, 5).22 Its occurrence in v. 7 strengthens the message that the “Jacob”

of old is the “Jacob” of the present and that God is acting in the present as he acted in the

past.

Who turns the rock into a water-pool . . . is an allusion to the provision of water

in the wilderness (Exod 17:6 and Num 20:7-11) in language resembling Deut 8:15: “Who

brought out for you water from the flinty rock.”23 But there is a creational twist, since the

psalm says that water and rock are altered from their natural state. The behavior of the

rock and the water parallels the changes in nature on a macro-level, when bodies of water

21 Clifford and Allen, following some earlier commentaries, take ארץ to mean “land,” that

is, the land of Israel, “the destination of the divine and human journey” (Allen, 139); or

the land whose inhabitants “must bow before the superiority of God who enters with his

people” (Clifford, 193). However, I take ארץ in the broader sense of the earth/world,

since the psalm is portraying a universal picture of the reaction to the (new) exodus.

22 TDOT 6:203. 23 Hakham, 164.


and mountains (=the earth) acted unnaturally in reaction to the exodus.24 The

provisioning of water in the wilderness thereby takes on a global dimension and forges

another link between the exodus and the creation; God’s act in the wilderness involving

water and rock imitates His act of creation. But, as noted above, the real reference is not

to the past exodus, but to the new exodus in the present, where God will act as he did in

the first exodus.

Pool of water . . . spring of water. The pool is the counterpart of the sea and the

spring of flowing water is the counterpart of the river. These terms are not used in the

exodus/wilderness tradition in the Torah;25 they are, rather, among the terms describing

how God can turn parched land into well-watered land (Isa 35:7, 41:18, Ps 74:13-15,

107:35), in poetry speaking about the return—another support for the idea that the

unstated topic in our verse is traversing the wilderness for the return. The word “spring”

is also associated with the waters of creation or the flood (Gen 7:11, 8:2, Ps 74:15,

104:10), another link between wilderness imagery and creation imagery.

* * * * * * * * * *

I am not the first to find a postexilic ideological agenda in Psalm 114. G. T. M.

Prinsloo, seeing a link with Psalm 113, says that the psalm: “originated in the postexilic

community as an exhortation to believe that Yahweh can and indeed will turn the misery

24 Weiss, The Bible from Within, 372-373. Flint and rock are the materials from which the

mountains are made (Job 28:9-10).

in reference to the waters of ,יאור dro ehT occurs in Exod 7:19 and 8:1, parallel to אגם25

Egypt.


of his poor, defenseless and exploited people into a new era of salvation. . . . As such

salvation becomes a present reality and an eschatological certainty for the postexilic

community who perceive themselves as poor and needy.”26 Susan Gillingham, tracing the

use of the exodus motif through various periods, observes that it served to ratify “the

community’s sense of special election.”27 More specifically, she concludes that Psalm

114, which she sees as having undergone a journey and evolution from its northern

origins to its adaptation by the Jerusalem cultus, spoke, in the Postexilic period, to the

issue of the restoration of Zion.28

26 “Tremble before the Lord, 321. 27 Gillingham, 26.

28 Gillingham, 39: “Setting this within the context of what is known of the various rival

claims to authority and leadership [in the postexilic period]—within the priesthood itself,

between royal and priestly factions, amongst the retournees and those having remained in

the land, and between those living in the north and those within Judah—the Exodus

tradition was an important means of addressing such issues.” Her idea that the psalm

originated in the north is drawn from earlier scholars who, based on the crossing of the

Jordan and the celebration of the Passover at Gilgal (Joshua 3-5), see this psalm (in an

earlier form) as deriving from that celebration (north of Judah). Additionally, seeing the

connections between our psalm and Exodus 15, she dates them both to the same period,

premonarchic at least in part (she calls Exodus 15 a composite text, an early core with

later additions, and implies the same for Psalm 114). But just because the exodus is an

ancient motif does not mean that every poem that incorporates it must be equally ancient.


Prinsloo and Gillingham are on the right track, but did not pinpoint what I believe

is the message of the psalm. Psalm 114 says that the birth of the nation of Israel was

earth-shaking, no less a cosmic event than the creation of the world. So, too, will be the

rebirth of the nation, the return from exile. It is one of a number of psalms (for example,

105, 106, 136) whose subject is the “return from exile” in which the return is anticipated

or celebrated and, most important, linked to the traditional Israelite past.

After 586 BCE, most notably in Second Isaiah, the exodus became a symbol for

the “new exodus,” the return from Babylonian captivity. Surprisingly, no one, to my

knowledge, has applied that observation to Psalm 114, but it is not a great leap to do so.

In fact, the discourse of this psalm resonates with that of Second Isaiah.29 Especially

significant is the way Isaiah and our psalm (and several others: 77:12-21, 78:15-16)

combine creation and exodus imagery and highlight the experiences at the Reed Sea and

I explain the connections with Exodus 15 as inner biblical allusion, the alluding to an

early text in a later text, implying a gap of some time between the two.

29 Similarities between certain psalms and Second Isaiah have been noted but a good

study of their relationship is needed. For now, see Sommer, A Prophet Reads

Scripture,108-127, with previous literature. Hans Barstad says that the Psalter was one of

Second Isaiah’s sources (A Way in the Wilderness, 108 and also 100). Barstad, however,

does not find that the motif of the second exodus is prominent in Second Isaiah because

he reads it out of most passages. He even reads it out of Ps 114:8, which, despite his

recognition of the allusions to Exod 17:6 and Num 20:11, he takes as a

“fertility/abundance/prosperity motif” (pp. 30-31).


in the wilderness journey. To strengthen my point, I want to present out a few Isaiah

passages that share common tropes with Psalm 114.

(1) Isa 11:15-16, part of a passage dated to an uncertain time in the postexilic

period, speaks of the drying up of the Egyptian sea and the breaking up of the river

Euphrates into seven streams by God’s wind, with an intertwining of creation and exodus

imagery, to make possible a crossing for those returning from Assyria, “such as there was

for Israel when it left the land of Egypt.”

(2) Closest to our psalm is Isa 51:9-11, which adds to the exodus and creation

tropes an explicit reference to the future return to Zion, implying that the return will be a

second creation-exodus event. Addressing God’s mighty arm, the prophet bids it to rise,

as it did in mythic time (days of old), and reminding it:

לת-הלוא את ת רהב מחול ב תנין. היא המחצי תהום רבה-הלוא את ת ים מ ב היא המחר

י ך לעבר גאולים.-השמה מעמק ר ים ד ראשם-ושמחת עולם על ופדויי ה' ישובון ובאו ציון ברנה

ואנחה. ושמחה ישיגון נסו יגוןששון

Were you not the one who chopped up Rahab, who pierced the sea-monster?

Was it not you who dried up the sea, the waters of the great deep?

Who made the depths of the sea a path for the redeemed to crossover?

So the ransomed of the Lord will return, and come to Zion with singing and

everlasting gladness on their heads,

They will attain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing will flee away.

What is explicit in Isaiah 51 is, in my view, implicit in Psalm 114.30 Indeed, Psalm 114’s

use of the exodus and creation as a cipher for the return from exile begins to look typical

of postexilic poetry, at least the poetry of Second Isaiah.

30 If, as some scholars suggest, Isa 51:11 was imported from Isa 35:10, then it may be

construed as a later interpretation or explanation, a footnote appended to the text, as it

were, by a later hand. That would make the original Isaianic passage even closer to our


(3) Isa 48:20-21 overtly connects the return from Babylonia with the provisioning

in the wilderness of the exodus: “Go forth from Babylonia . . . . Say: The Lord has

redeemed His servant Jacob. They have known no thirst, though He led them through

parched places. He made water flow for them from a rock; He cleaved the rock and water

gushed out.”

(4) Isa 43:16-21, exactly like our psalm, encapsulates the past exodus as the

parting of the Reed Sea and the new exodus as the providing of water in the wilderness.

Who makes a path through the sea,

And a way through strong waters,

. . . . .

Do not recall those first things,

Do not consider those early events.

Behold, I am about to do a new thing,

Now it will happen, will you not perceive it?

I will indeed make a path through the wilderness

And rivers in the desert.

The wild animals shall honor me,

Jackals and ostriches,

For I provide water in the wilderness,

Rivers in the desert,

To give drink to my chosen people,

The people I formed for myself . . .

The wilderness that the people must traverse on their return from Babylonia has

two counterparts in the exodus trope. First, it is equated with the water imagery of the

crossing of the Reed Sea, which, in turn, is linked with the defeat of the waters of chaos,

for in both waters God defeated his enemy and established his suzerainty over the world.

Second, the wilderness of the return is equated with the wandering in the wilderness of

the exodus, for in both places God provides for his people in a hostile environment. In the

psalm in that it lacked an explicit reference to the return from exile. In any case, as it

stands now, Isa 51:9-11 explicitly reads the return as a replay of the exodus.


second wilderness image, the water is a beneficent provision, not a hostile force to be

defeated. Finally, both the Reed Sea and the wilderness of the exodus come together on a

larger scale to signal the return, for in both sea and wilderness God made a path through

the uncharted expanse, as he will when he leads his people home after the exile.

Both the psalmist and the prophet use the traditions about the mythic past to give

meaning to the present for a new generation that sees itself as the heirs to that past. The

present situation becomes meaningful only when it is set within the traditional narrative

of Israel’s past. By tying their return from exile (or their hope for return) tightly to their

traditional past, the psalmist makes the past live in the present, and makes the present as

certain as if it had already happened. Several recent studies have touched upon this

function of myth, or cultural memory. In his recent book, Michael Fishbane observes that

“myth and history are complexly interfused in ancient Israelite thought.”31 He explains

that:

there is a sense that all of God’s mighty acts are correlated, from the earliest

victories over archaic monsters down to and including the salvations wrought for

the people of Israel past and present.32

Irrespective of their historicity, the narratives of the creation and the exodus had

taken on a mythic dimension, serving as archetypes, symbols of God’s power that

31 Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking, 65. For a good discussion of biblical myth

see also Fitzpatrick, The Disarmament of God, 49-73.

32 Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking, 41.


transcend actual historicity. That is what enables the psalmist to use them as he does.33

As David M. Carr puts it, the “past is never ‘past’ in the way we might conceive it but

stands in the ancient world as a potentially realizable ‘present’ to which each generation

seeks to return.”34

A similar thought was expressed by Herbert J. Levine in connection with Psalm

114. Levine uses the term “archetypes” for God’s past acts of deliverance. These

archetypes are

recalled in order to connect an unspecified present, which may itself be

remarkable or unremarkable, with the sacred history of Israel’s past . . . . In these

archetypes of divine deliverance, historic time unites with mythic time, history’s

God with nature’s God, and Israel’s temporal experience is brought into the

framework of eternity.35

We see, then, that the allusions to the creation and the exodus are not simply dead

metaphors or literary flourishes. At the same time, we should not mistake the mythic past

as the main topic of the poem. Myths remain living concepts that structure later Israelite

33 See Fishbane, Text and Texture, 140. Some of the ideas about myth that reappear in

Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking are already inherent in this earlier work. Indeed,

others have also expressed them. See the discussion in Levenson, Sinai and Zion, 102-

111. David Carr prefers the term “cultural memory” (Written on the Tablets of the Heart,

11).

34 Written on the Tablet of the Heart, 11. Levenson (Sinai and Zion, 103) cites Brevard

Child’s phrase “a timeless age of the past”.

35 Levine, Sing Unto God a New Song, 145.


thought. Mythic references are building-blocks to shape new ideas, new ways of seeing

the world. They succinctly capture a bundle of traditional associations that are used to

evoke meaning in a new context.

That is why I have taken pains to explain how these mythic references are

activated in Psalm 114 and towards what end, and also why there is a gradual shift from

past to present in the grammar of the psalm. The “present” on which the mythic past is

brought to bear is the situation of the exilic or postexilic Judean community, those

already in Judah or those hoping for a return to Judah. Psalm 114 is not simply

celebrating an event in the distant past. For the psalmist, the distant past is happening

now and always. It is being replayed in the rebirth of Israel, and that rebirth is no less

earth-shattering than Israel’s initial birth. A new exodus sequence—wandering,

settlement in the land, and building a temple—is envisioned on the model of the original

exodus, and no less significant to the world. For the Judean community, their moment in

history is, in Hebert Levine’s words, “brought into the framework of eternity.”36

36 Parts of this paper were presented at the 2005 annual meeting of the Association for

Jewish Studies in Washington and at a Symposium on the Book of Psalms at Baylor

University on May 18, 2006. I thank Baruch Schwartz for his comments on an earlier

draft that helped me to clarify my presentation.


Works Consulted

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(2001) 289-311.

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Richard J. Clifford and John J. Collins. CBQ Monograph Series 24. Washington,

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1985.

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The Message of Psalm 114

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