One thing makes God laugh: human beings who think they are gods. This is a divine response we often do not recognize because we were neither looking for it nor expecting it. The use of humor is one of the Torah’s most subtle devices, and its intent is deadly serious. God mocks those who mock Him. Not because He is jealous of His honor. To the contrary, as Rabbi Yoĥanan said in the Talmud: God’s greatness is His humility (Megilla 31a).

God mocks those who set themselves up above others, who have divine or semi-divine pretensions, because He cares for their victims. His use of humor is precisely judged and measure-for-measure. Those who are high He brings low. Those who are low He lifts high. Those who take themselves seriously, He turns into jokes. Those the world laughs at, He takes as His own. Unless we understand this, we will miss an essential dimension of the division of the Reed Sea. We will see it as a mere miracle – the sea divided, water turned into dry land, the order of nature overturned – which it is, but only secondarily. Its real point is more serious. It is about the will to power, the ethics of militarism and faith in arms and armies. Its message is deep, precise, ominous and very much still relevant.

The best way of understanding the Torah’s approach to human self-pretension is through examples. The obvious case is Balaam. Balaam is the archetype of the shaman, the wonder-worker who uses religion in a way the Torah regards as blasphemous, as a means of enlisting supernatural powers to human ends. As Balak, King of Moab, says to him:

Now come and put a curse on these people, because they are too powerful for me. Perhaps then I will be able to defeat them and drive them out of the land. For I know that whoever you bless is blessed, and whoever you curse is cursed. (Num. 22:6)

Balaam goes through the usual formalities. He cannot, he says, do anything against God’s will. He must first find out whether the mission is acceptable. This turns out however to be mere show because when he first asks God, God says no. But when a second attempt is made to persuade him, promising him more honor and reward, he asks God again, proving that he believes that God, like man, can change His mind. God is angry, though the text does not tell us this yet. The form His anger takes is that He gives permission to Balaam to go. Since Balaam has shown he only half-accepts the answer “No,” God gives him the answer “Yes.” The sages described this as the rule that “where you want to go, that is where you will be led” (Makkot 10b). The next morning Balaam sets out, and the famous scene with the ass takes place.

A joke is being played on Balaam. His ass sees an angel that Balaam, the greatest seer of his age, cannot see. The ass speaks, proving what God told Moses at the burning bush: “Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the Lord?” (Ex. 4:11). Balaam has the hubris to think he is the master of God’s word, that he can decide who will be blessed and cursed. God shows him that even an ass can see and speak if God wills it. Balaam cannot see an angel with a drawn sword even when it is directly in front of him, and far from cursing the Israelites finds himself losing a moral argument with a talking donkey.

Satire descends into farce as the man to whom Balak has offered a fortune to curse the Israelites proceeds to bestow on them some of the most unforgettable blessings in the entire Torah. This happens because Balak and Balaam believe that blessings and curses are for sale and that divine powers can be exploited for human ends.

The second scene occurs in the story of the Tower of Babel. The people on the plain of Shinar propose to build a city with “a tower that reaches heaven” (Gen. 11:4). This is one of the biblical narratives for which the realia are well known through archeology. More than thirty Mesopotamian ziggurats or towers have been unearthed, the most famous of which, and one of the largest, was that of Babylon which rose to a height of some three hundred feet from a square base, with a sanctuary at the summit.

At the beginning of the second millennium BCE, the Sumerian ruler of Lagash, Gudea, says of the temple of Eninnu that “it rose to the sky.” Later Esarhaddon says of the temple of Ashur that he made “its top high as heaven.” The same language is used of the temple of Marduk in Babylon. So the ambition was real. The towers of the first great civilization on earth, the place Abraham and his family left, were man-made structures, artificial holy mountains, on which it was believed people – kings especially – could ascend to heaven to meet the gods.

The biblical text, having described this briefly and with precision, then says: “God said… ‘Come, let us descend’” (11:6–7). So miniscule is the tower that God has to “descend” to be able to see it at all: a joke we can only fully appreciate now that we are able to fly over sky­scrapers from a height of thirty thousand feet and see how small the highest building looks from even a modest elevation in the sky. The builders had been led to this hubris by a simple technological advance: the use of kilns to make bricks harder and more durable than their sun-dried equivalents.

No sooner had they achieved this than they began to believe that humans can make mountains, reach the sky and be like gods. In response God uses no high technology, no miracle. He merely confuses the language of the builders. Immediately the serious project of human self-aggrandizement is reduced to farce as orders are shouted out by the supervisors and no one understands what they are saying. Not only can the builders not converse with the gods, they cannot even converse with one another. It is a coup de theatre designed to make fun of those who take themselves seriously as masters of the universe.

The result is precisely judged. The builders sought to make the city so that they “would not be scattered over the face of the earth” (v. 4). The result is that they were “scattered over the face of the earth” (vv. 8–9). They sought to “make a name for ourselves” (v. 4) and they succeeded, but not as they intended. Babel became the eternal name, not for order but for confusion.

The logic of these and similar narratives is given in Psalm 2, the text that speaks about God’s laughter:

Why do the nations clamor, why are the peoples speaking futilities? The kings of this earth have assembled; the leaders have banded together against the Lord and His anointed. “Let us cut their bonds,” they have said, “and cast from us their cords.” The One who presides in heaven shall laugh; the Lord will jeer at them. (Ps. 2:1–4)

Turning to the division of the Reed Sea, we begin by noting a pointed ambiguity in the Torah’s description of what happened and how:

Moses raised his hand over the sea, and the Lord moved the sea with a strong easterly wind all that night; it turned the sea into dry land, and the waters were divided. So the children of Israel walked into the midst of the sea on dry land, and the water was like a wall for them on their right and on their left. (Ex. 14:21–22)

Of the two phrases emphasized above, the second phrase, “the water was like a wall,” suggests a supernatural event. God suspended the laws of nature. The Israelites walked on dry land between walls of water held in place by the divine will alone. This is the first reading, with all its drama. The Egyptians, with their horse-drawn chariots, see themselves as an invincible military power about to crush a group of powerless, fugitive slaves. God unleashes against them the forces of nature itself, using the sea (in ancient times a symbol of primal chaos, the Ugaritic god Yam, or in Egyptian mythology Apep, enemy of the sun god Ra), wielding it as a weapon to defend His otherwise defenseless people to overthrow the army of the man who thought himself a god.

But the first phrase, moved the sea with a strong easterly wind, suggests a different reading. No suspension of the laws of nature is needed for a strong east wind, in the right place at the right time, to uncover dry land where, at other times, there was sea. To mention just one of many recent scientific accounts, in September 2010, researchers at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of Colorado showed by computer simulation how a sixty-three-miles-per-hour east wind, blowing overnight, would have pushed back water at a point in the Nile Delta where an ancient river merged with a coastal lagoon. The water would have been driven back into the two waterways and a land bridge opened at the bend, allowing people to walk across the exposed mud flats. As soon as the wind died down, the waters would have rushed back. The leader of the project said when the report was published: “The simulations match fairly closely with the account in Exodus.”¹ (London: Continuum, 2003). This is one of several explanations offered by scientists to show how the division of the sea might have happened naturally.

footnotes: ¹ A report can be found at https://www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews/news/2663/parting-waters-computer-modeling-applies-physics-red-sea-escape-route. For another account by a professor of materials science at Cambridge University, see Colin Humphreys, The Miracles of Exodus

This does not mean that it was not a miracle. Rather, it suggests a different way of understanding the nature of a miracle: not an event that suspends the laws of nature but rather one that, by happening when, how and to whom it did, constituted a deliverance that was a signal of transcendence, written unmistakably in God’s handwriting, a divine intervention but not a scientific impossibility.², “the sea returned to its original strength,” the sages said, this means letano, “to its condition,” suggesting that “the Holy One, blessed be He, made a condition with the elements of the universe during the six days of creation.” One of these was that the sea should split before the Israelites (Genesis Raba 5:5). On this reading the division of the sea was programmed into the script of nature from the beginning of time. Thus did the sages seek to reconcile the supernatural with the natural: miracles happen but the universe retains its law-like character.

footnotes: ² The sages offered a third, mediating possibility. By a play on the word le’eitano

The second reading suggests a quite different way of understanding the events that took place at the sea. The military dominance of the Egyptians was based on the horse-drawn chariot, introduced into Egypt by the Hyksos in the sixteenth century BCE. This made the Egyptian army invincible. It was the symbol of their strength. There is however one form of terrain in which the horse-drawn chariot is a source not of strength but of weakness, namely an uncovered, saturated seabed. The Israelites, traveling on foot, were able to walk across, but the Egyptians, pursuing after them in their chariots, found that “the wheels of their chariots were unfastened and drove with difficulty” (Ex. 14:25). They became stuck in the mire, unable to move forward or back. Their very obsession with catching up with the Israelites had driven them heedless into danger. By the time they found themselves trapped, they were helpless. As the wind dropped and the waters returned, they were caught, defeated not by an army but by their own desire to exercise power over the vulnerable and by their own reliance on military technology.

On this reading the significance of the event is not its supernatural quality but something more consequential, an irony that echoes through the centuries: those who trust in weapons of war, perish by weapons of war. Those who worship military technology eventually become its victims. We become, says Psalm 115 (part of Hallel), what we worship. If we worship instruments of death, we die. If we worship the God of life, we live. Or, as Psalm 147 puts it:

He does not take delight in the strength of horses, nor pleasure in the fleetness of man. The Lord takes pleasure in those who fear Him, who put their hope in His loving care. (Ps. 147:10–11)

The scene of the Israelite refugees, on foot, crossing the sea to safety while the Egyptian army floundered, rendered helpless by the very vehicles that had made them believe they were invulnerable, is unforgettable. The powerful have been rendered powerless while the powerless make their way to freedom. The truth conveyed by that image does not require for its proof a suspension of the laws of nature. It is one of the laws of human nature, forgotten in every generation by those who worship power. Those who see themselves as more than human become less than human. Those who laugh at God become the laughingstock of history.