The sea has just closed.
The Egyptian army, the most powerful military force on earth, lies scattered across the water like broken reeds. Six hundred chariots. Gone. And Moses opens his mouth.
It’s magnificent. Soaring. And when Moses and the children of Israel finish, Miriam picks up a tambourine.
The Torah doesn’t explain the moment. It simply tells us that Miriam the prophetess led all the women out in dance and called to them: “Sing to the Lord, for He is highly exalted.” Same opening line. Same God. Same shore. But something in her song had been a long time coming.
According to the sages, the women packed their instruments before leaving Egypt. While everything was chaos and urgency, they stopped to grab their tambourines. They knew there would be a song. They were already ready.
That kind of readiness doesn’t come from optimism in the moment. It comes from an entire life of anticipating redemption. Miriam had stood at the edge of the Nile as a young girl, watching a basket drift in the rushes, her infant brother’s life balanced on the current. She didn’t know how it would end. She just waited. Held her breath. Stayed.
That is the faith her tambourine carried.
The Biblical commentators counted ten great songs of redemption woven through the Bible. Here they are, in order: the song the Israelites sang in their homes on the very night of the Exodus (referenced in Isaiah 30:29); the Song at the Sea (Exodus 15); the song of the well in the desert, when water sprang up and the people burst into spontaneous praise (Numbers 21); Moses’ great farewell poem sung on the last day of his life (Deuteronomy 32); Joshua’s song after the sun stood still in battle (Joshua 10); Deborah’s ferocious victory hymn after defeating Sisera’s army (Judges 5); King David’s song of deliverance from all his enemies (2 Samuel 22); David’s psalm for the dedication of the Temple (Psalm 30); and Solomon’s Song of Songs, that strange and gorgeous love poem that Rabbi Akiva called the holiest book in all of scripture.
Nine songs. Nine moments when history cracked open and the only adequate response was music.
The tenth song, say the Rabbis, is still coming. It will be the song of the final redemption, so complete and world-altering that it will need an entirely new musical vocabulary. Nothing from the previous nine will quite fit. Which means that even after everything, even after all nine eruptions of praise across the span of human history, we are still building toward something. The song is not finished.
Miriam knew this. You can hear it in the tambourine.
We don’t sing when we’re comfortable. We sing when we’re reaching for something, when joy is almost too big for words, or when longing has nowhere else to go. The women of Israel had carried that longing for generations. They had survived Pharaoh’s decrees, watched their families scattered and broken, kept going anyway. And when the sea closed and the danger passed, they didn’t just exhale. They danced.
That’s not relief. That’s a people who never stopped believing the song was coming.
The Song at the Sea lives in Jewish prayer to this day, recited every single morning. We keep singing it because we are still inside the story it tells, still moving from slavery toward something we can’t quite see yet, still waiting for the tenth song that has no melody yet.
Miriam packed her tambourine in the dark, before the miracle, before the sea moved, before there was any reason to believe she’d ever need it.
