Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Exodus · About this commentary
Bitter Water Made Sweet
Exodus 15:22-27
22 Moses led Israel onward from the Red Sea, and they went out into the wilderness of Shur; and they went three days in the wilderness, and found no water. · WEB
Three days after the sea, the singing stops over drinking water, and God attaches a promise about health to a test about obedience.
Moses led Israel onward from the Red Sea, and they went out into the wilderness of Shur; and they went three days in the wilderness, and found no water Exodus 15:22.
Three days. The song is barely finished. Between the greatest deliverance in the nation's history and its first complaint there is less than a week, and the subject is not danger but thirst — an ordinary hardship, of the kind the desert supplies daily.
When they came to Marah, they couldn't drink from the waters of Marah, for they were bitter Exodus 15:23.
The cruelty of Marah is in the sequence: water found, and undrinkable. Hope raised and withdrawn is harder to bear than plain absence, and the place keeps the name.
The people murmured against Moses, saying, "What shall we drink?" Exodus 15:24.
The verb is the one the wilderness narratives will use again and again. It is not a request; nobody asks God for water. The complaint is directed at the man in front of them, which is the standard shape of this failure — a grievance against providence delivered to whoever is available.
Then he cried to Yahweh. Yahweh showed him a tree, and he threw it into the waters, and the waters were made sweet Exodus 15:25.
Moses does with the complaint what he has done before: takes it upward. The remedy is a piece of wood, which no more explains the result than a raised rod explains a divided sea. What is provided is not a technique but an instruction, and the instruction had to be asked for.
There he made a statute and an ordinance for them, and there he tested them Exodus 15:25.
The test was the water, and it had already been failed. What follows is a promise with a condition, given to a people who have just demonstrated they need it: if you will diligently listen to Yahweh your God's voice... I will put none of the diseases on you which I have put on the Egyptians; for I am Yahweh who heals you Exodus 15:26.
Two things in it are worth separating. The first is a plain statement that obedience and physical wellbeing are connected — not as a magical exchange, but because the statutes about food, cleanliness, rest and quarantine that this nation is about to receive really do prevent much of what afflicted Egypt. The second is the title, which is broader than the condition and stands on its own. He is the healer; the promise concerns whether Israel will live in a way that lets him be it for them.
They came to Elim, where there were twelve springs of water and seventy palm trees Exodus 15:27.
One day's march past the bitter pool lies Elim , and abundance — twelve springs for twelve tribes, and seventy palms for the seventy who came into Egypt Exodus 1:5. It had been there the whole time. The narrative offers no comment, and the arithmetic of the numbers is left for the reader to notice, as is the fact that the complaint at Marah was made within a day of a place with more water than the nation could use.
settled What this mark means