“... He likens her to “a mare among Pharaoh’s chariots,” a phrase that finds its first scriptural resonance in Exodus 15:1–18, which is another scriptural song, that of Moses. The verbal resonances are direct and explicit: there, as here, Pharaoh’s chariots (currus) are mentioned with their horses (equi); Moses and, immediately afterward, Miriam sing there of the Lord’s destruction of those chariots and horses by submersion in the Red Sea. Here in the Song, the horse is female, equa rather than equus, and in likening the beloved to “a mare among Pharaoh’s chariots” the Song is profoundly suggestive: Pharaoh’s stallions, representing an idolatrous slave empire out for the blood of its escaped slaves, were drowned. This mare, the Lord’s beloved, is greater than they, overcoming their instruments of violence (“chariots”) by her beauty and by her having received and acceded to the Lord’s loving promise. ...”