Exodus 15:2

Hebrew Bible

1 Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the Lord. They said, “I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously, the horse and its rider he has thrown into the sea. 2 The Lord is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation. This is my God, and I will praise him, my father’s God, and I will exalt him. 3 The Lord is a man of war10— the Lord is his name. 4 The chariots of Pharaoh and his army he has thrown into the sea, and his chosen officers were drowned in the Red Sea. 5 The depths have covered them; they went down to the bottom like a stone.

Pseudo Jonathan Exodus 15:2

Targum

2 Our strength and the (object of) our many praises, feared by all the ages, the Lord. He declared through his Memra and he was for me a redeeming God.” From their mother's breasts the sucklings would indicate with their fingers to their fathers and would say: “This is our God who had us suck honey from the rock and oil from the flint stone at the time when our mothers went out into the open country and gave birth to us and abandoned us there. He would send an angel who would bathe us and swaddle us. And now let us praise him, the God of our fathers, and let us extol him.” 3 The children of Israel said, “The Lord is a hero who wages our wars in every generation. He makes his strength known to his people, the house of Israel. The Lord is his name; like his name is his strength. May his name be blessed forever and ever!

 Notes and References

"... Now, if we suppose that this tradition was already in use in the commentary on Exodus 15 as early as the 10th century BC, we immediately understand the content of Wisdom of Solomon 10:20-21: "They celebrated, Lord, your holy Name; they sang with one heart of your protective arm. For Wisdom opened the mouths of the mute! and made clear the tongues of the little ones. The author of the book is not the first to be inspired here by Psalm 8:3, and one cannot claim that Rabbinic exegesis depends on him. Rather, he indirectly attests to the antiquity of the correlation between Exodus 15 and Psalm 8, which Rabbinic literature will consistently exploit. It has been noted that his text develops while respecting the laws of Semitic parallelism. The two hemistichs of 20 present a case of synonymous parallelism. We can therefore ask if the same is not true for the two following ones. From then on, should the mute of verse 21 be taken literally, as if the miracles of the last times (compare Isaiah 35:6) were introduced in the context of the exodus, or in a broader sense? ..."

Grelot, Pierre Sagesse 10,21 et le Targum de l'Exode (pp. 49-60) Biblica 42, no. 1, 1961

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