What Does Exodus 15:5 Mean?

"The floods covered them; they went down into the depths like a stone." The "floods" (Hebrew: tehomot, the deeps/abyssal waters) that covered the Egyptian army invoke the original waters of Genesis 1:2: the tehom (deep) that existed before creation, the chaotic pre-creation waters that YHWH ordered at creation. The Egyptian army sank into the tehomot: the primal deeps of chaos that YHWH organized at creation. Egypt's destruction is a return to the pre-creation chaos that YHWH alone controls: the army that pursued Israel into YHWH's sea-path is swallowed by the deeps that YHWH alone governs.

"They went down into the depths like a stone": the stone-sinking simile is the physical image of irreversible destruction: armor-weighted soldiers and Horse-driven chariots sank, and stones do not rise. The simile emphasizes the terminal quality of the sinking: Egypt's army went to the bottom and stayed there. The stone-sinking image will be echoed by the great oracle against Babylon in Jeremiah 51:63-64: "when you finish reading this scroll, tie a stone to it and throw it into the middle of the Euphrates, and say, 'Thus shall Babylon sink...'"

The tehomot vocabulary of the Song of the Sea becomes the theological basis for the New Testament's sea-conquest motifs. Revelation repeatedly invokes the sea as the domain of chaos and death: the beast rises from the sea (Revelation 13:1), and the new creation has no sea (Revelation 21:1). The trajectory from creation's tehom (Genesis 1:2) through the Exodus sea-victory (Exodus 15:5) to the new creation without sea (Revelation 21:1) is the canonical arc of YHWH's war against the powers of chaos: a war that begins at creation, is won definitively at the Exodus sea crossing, and is resolved permanently in the new creation.