Exodus 15:26

The verse follows straight on from the song Moses and Miriam sang on the shore (Exodus 15:1–21), after God parted the sea and overthrew Pharaoh’s army (Exodus 14:21–31). Now Moses leads the people away from the sea. The KJV’s “brought” translates nâçaʻ, a verb that means to pull up tent pegs, and so to set out on a journey. “They went out” is yâtsâʼ, to go or come out, and “they went three days” is yâlak, the ordinary word for walking. The verbs show a whole people breaking camp and walking into the desert behind Moses, the leader God had given them.

The wilderness, midbâr, is wilderness or desert, open land with no towns or fields. The wilderness of Shur lay beyond the sea, in the Sinai peninsula, and Numbers, in its list of Israel’s journeys, calls this stretch the wilderness of Etham (Numbers 33:8). Water there was scarce. For a great company of men, women and children with their livestock, possibly numbering in the millions, three days without water put their lives in danger. Whatever water they had carried from the sea would be gone by then, so the need was urgent and the people had come to the end of their own supply. The word for water, mayim, is dual in form and singular in sense, and the verse ends on it: “and found no water.”

After three dry days the people reach water, and it is too bitter to drink. The Hebrew phrase, lo’ yakhlu lishtot, says plainly that they were unable to drink it. The water, mayim again, lay right in front of them, which made the disappointment all the sharper.

The word for bitter is mar, used of a sharp, unpleasant taste, and elsewhere of grief and hardship. The place took its name from its water. Mârâh comes from the same root and means bitterness. “Therefore the name of it was called Marah” tells us the name came from what happened there. Places in Scripture are often named for an event, and this name kept the memory of the trial and of what God did next.

The people, ʿam, the whole nation gathered as one, murmured against Moses. The verb lûwn is a word for grumbling, and it can carry the sense of digging in, a complaint the speaker keeps up. Their question uses shâthâh, the plain word for drinking, and the need behind it was real. They put it to Moses as a charge, as though he had brought them into the desert to die of thirst. Only days earlier they had sung of God’s triumph, and now the need in front of them crowded out the memory of what he had done.

They were newly freed slaves. In Egypt they had been fed, even under oppression, and their trust in God was young. In that land water was always precious, as when the herdmen of Gerar strove with Isaac’s herdmen over wells. Their complaint at Marah begins a pattern that runs through the wilderness years. The people complained at Taberah (Numbers 11:1), wished to go back to Egypt (Numbers 14:1–4), and quarrelled with Moses again over water (Numbers 20:2–5), and a psalm remembers the water God gave them in the desert and how they still sinned against him (Psalm 78:15–20). God answered with patience and provision, with manna and quail (Exodus 16:1–35) and with water from the rock at Rephidim (Exodus 17:1–7). The same burden fell on Moses each time, leading a people quick to doubt.

Moses takes the trouble to God. “He cried unto the LORD” uses tsâʻaq, to cry out or call for help in hardship. The name he calls on is Yᵉhôvâh, the LORD, God’s covenant name, which comes from the verb hâyâh, “to be”. It speaks of the God who is, who is present with his people and keeps his promises, and it is the same LORD who answers.

The LORD shows Moses a tree. “Shewed” is yârâh, a verb that means to point out and also to teach, so God both pointed out the tree and taught Moses what to do with it. Moses casts it into the water, and the water is made sweet. The answer comes at once, given to a leader who prayed on behalf of a people who had only grumbled.

“There he made for them a statute and an ordinance, and there he proved them.” A statute, chôq, is something prescribed, such as a law, a decree or a set limit, and the ordinance is mishpâṭ. Before Israel ever reached Sinai (Exodus 19) and heard the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20), God gave them a word to live by, and the next verse gives its content. God freed his people from Egypt so that they might live as his people under his word, and the giving of the law begins here, beside water he had just made sweet.

“Proved” is nâçâh, to test, try or prove. God already knew their hearts. The testing showed the people what was in them, and it gave them room to grow in trust and obedience. The whole event at Marah, the thirst, the complaint, the tree and the statute, was that test. A psalm recalls God’s word to Israel, “I proved thee at the waters of Meribah” (Psalm 81:7), and Nehemiah’s prayer looks back on the years in which God sustained his people in the wilderness (Nehemiah 9:20–21).

The statute comes as a promise with conditions. “If thou wilt diligently hearken to the voice of the LORD thy God” uses shâmaʻ, to hear, and the Hebrew doubles the verb in an infinitive absolute construction that strengthens it: listen, and listen with care. Hearing in Scripture leads to doing. The next three phrases, doing what is right in his sight, giving ear to his commandments and keeping all his statutes, ask for that whole response. “Statutes” is chôq again, the same word as in verse 25, so the word given at Marah is the beginning of all God’s statutes.

The promise is that God “will put none of these diseases upon thee, which I have brought upon the Egyptians”. Israel had just watched the plagues. The God who brought them on Egypt could keep them from his own people. In the law of Moses, sickness belonged among the curses for disobedience and health among the blessings for obedience, as Deuteronomy 28 sets out at length.

Then God gives the reason, in a name: “for I am the LORD that healeth thee”, Yᵉhôvâh Ropheka, often called Jehovah Rapha. The verb râphâʼ means to mend or cure, and Scripture uses it of human physicians as well as of God. Here God takes it as his own name toward Israel. He is their healer, and he had just shown it at Marah by making bitter water sweet. His healing reaches past the body. David blesses the LORD, “Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases” (Psalm 103:2–3), a psalm says, “He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds” (Psalm 147:3), and God promises his scattered people, “I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds” (Jeremiah 30:17).

After Marah comes Elim. The name ʼÊylim is a plural, likely from a word for large, strong trees, which suits a place of palms. The “wells” are ʻayin, the Hebrew word for an eye, which is also used for a spring of water. So Elim had twelve springs, and seventy palm trees, “threescore and ten” in the KJV, to give shade from the sun and perhaps dates to eat. “They encamped there by the waters” uses chânâh, to pitch tents or encamp. The people who had walked three days without water and then found it bitter now rest by plenty.

This is how God led his people. The test at Marah was followed by rest and refreshment, and he gave more than the bare need. David says, “he leadeth me beside the still waters” (Psalm 23:2), and God promises through Isaiah, “I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water” (Isaiah 41:18). Paul’s words fit Elim: “God is faithful” (1 Corinthians 1:9).

The wilderness, the thirst and the healing all point to Jesus. He too was led by the Spirit into the wilderness (Luke 4:1–2), where he fasted forty days, and he answered the tempter with the words of Deuteronomy 8:3 (Matthew 4:1–11). Where Israel murmured within three days, Jesus trusted his Father in deeper need, for he was “in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15).

Israel’s thirst points to a deeper thirst that he alone satisfies. Jesus told the woman at the well that he gives living water, and whoever drinks it will never thirst (John 4:10–14). He cried in the temple, “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink” (John 7:37–38). He is the bread of life (John 6:35), and Paul says of Israel in the wilderness, “they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:4).

The tree that made bitter water sweet points to the cross. Peter writes that Christ “his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24), and Paul says that Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by hanging on a tree (Galatians 3:13). The bitterness of sin and death was taken by him, so that forgiveness and life could be given to us. At the end of the Bible a river of the water of life flows from God’s throne, and beside it stands the tree of life, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations (Revelation 22:1–2).

The LORD who heals is seen in Christ as well. Isaiah foretold that the Messiah would bear our griefs and carry our sorrows, and that by his stripes we are healed (Isaiah 53:4–5), and Matthew says this was fulfilled when Jesus healed the sick (Matthew 8:16–17). In the new creation “there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain” (Revelation 21:4).

The statute given at Marah finds its fulfilment in him too. Jesus came to fulfil the law (Matthew 5:17), and in the new covenant God says, “I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes” (Ezekiel 36:27). Elim’s rest is his to give as well. He calls the weary to come to him for rest (Matthew 11:28), his grace abounds to all who receive it (Romans 5:17), and the Lamb will lead his people to living fountains of waters (Revelation 7:17).

These six verses show us God in the first days of his people’s freedom. He led them into the wilderness on purpose, and he was with them there. When the water was bitter, he heard the cry of the one who prayed and answered at once, though the people had only complained. He gave them his word to live by, and he gave them his name: the LORD that healeth thee. Then he led them on to springs and shade enough for every tribe.

The same God leads his people now. Marah and Elim both lie on the road he chooses, and Moses’ cry shows where the bitter places are to be taken. The healer who made the water sweet has given us Christ, the living water, and his word to Israel holds for all who belong to him: “I am the LORD that healeth thee.”