What Does Exodus 15:8 Mean?

"At the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up; the floods stood up in a heap; the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea." The sea-opening is described in verse 8 through the "blast of your nostrils". YHWH's breath, the divine life-force that created humans (Genesis 2:7), is here the wind that piled up the sea. The east wind of Exodus 14:21 is the blast of YHWH's nostrils: what the narrative described naturalistically (a strong east wind), the song describes theologically (the breath of YHWH's nostrils). Both are true; the naturalistic and the theological are the same event described from different perspectives.

"The floods stood up in a heap" (Hebrew: nitzvu kemo ned mayim, the waters stood up like a mound/heap): the heap-of-waters image is the miraculous compression of the sea into a standing wall. Water does not naturally stand in heap-form; the poem is celebrating the sea-walls as a miracle of divine breath-power. Psalm 78:13 echoes this: "He divided the sea and let them pass through it, and made the waters stand like a heap." The heap-of-waters becomes the Song of the Sea's most cited image in subsequent biblical poetry about the sea crossing.

"The deeps congealed in the heart of the sea": the congealing (qaphe'u, solidified/thickened) of the deeps in the sea's midst is the water-wall image expressed through the solidification image: the walls of water were as solid as congealed liquid. The hardening of the water walls to allow passage is the miracle's physical description: the sea became solid enough to stand as walls while Israel walked between them on dry ground. The verse's three images (blast pile, heap, congealing) are sequential descriptions of how the sea went from normal to miraculous: blown, heaped, solidified.