Biblion Bible Commentary
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Water from the Rock
Exodus 17:1-7
1 All the congregation of the children of Israel traveled from the wilderness of Sin, starting according to Yahweh’s commandment, and encamped in Rephidim; but there was no water for the people to drink. · WEB
The people put God on trial over drinking water, and the rock that is struck is one God himself stands on.
All the congregation of the children of Israel traveled from the wilderness of Sin, starting according to Yahweh's commandment, and encamped in Rephidim; but there was no water for the people to drink Exodus 17:1.
The clause about the commandment is placed deliberately. They are exactly where they were told to camp at Rephidim , and there is no water there. As at the sea, obedience has led them into the difficulty rather than around it.
Therefore the people quarreled with Moses, and said, "Give us water to drink" Exodus 17:2.
The demand is addressed to a man who cannot supply it, which is the giveaway. Moses names what is actually happening: why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test Yahweh? Two different verbs, two different targets. The quarrel is with him; the test is of God, and it is conducted through him.
Why have you brought us up out of Egypt, to kill us, our children, and our livestock with thirst? Exodus 17:3.
The accusation has hardened since the last complaint. At Marah they asked what they would drink; here the charge is deliberate murder, made against the one who divided the sea for them six weeks earlier. They are almost ready to stone me Exodus 17:4, Moses tells God.
Take the rod in your hand with which you struck the Nile, and go. Behold, I will stand before you there on the rock in Horeb. You shall strike the rock Exodus 17:5–6.
Three details, and each is deliberate. The rod is identified as the one that struck the river — the instrument of judgment on Egypt is now to bring water to the people accusing him. The elders are brought as witnesses, so that what happens cannot afterward be disputed. And God places himself on the rock that is about to be struck, standing where the blow will land.
That last detail is why the incident is read as more than a rescue, and the reading is supplied by Scripture rather than imposed on it: Paul, describing this generation, says they drank of a spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ 1 Corinthians 10:4. The pattern is consistent with everything the book has been building. Judgment falls on one who stands in the place of the guilty, and what comes out of it is life for the people who deserved the blow. The rock is struck once here; when Moses strikes a rock a second time forty years later, against instructions to speak to it, the cost to him is the promised land Numbers 20:11–12.
He called the name of the place Massah, and Meribah, because the children of Israel quarreled, and because they tested Yahweh, saying, "Is Yahweh among us, or not?" Exodus 17:7.
The two names mean testing and quarreling, and the question underneath them is quoted so that no one mistakes what was really at issue. A nation led by a visible pillar of cloud, fed every morning by bread from the sky, asks whether God is among them. The question is not about water. It is the one that keeps being asked whenever provision pauses, and Scripture returns to this place repeatedly as the type of a hardened heart Psalms 95:8 Hebrews 3:8.
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