Crossing the Red Sea

Sarcophagus of the crossing of the Red Sea by Unknown artist

Israelites Crossing the Red Sea by Israelites Crossing the Red Sea

Exodus 14

Commentaries by Geri Parlby

Works of art by Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem, Marc Chagall and Unknown artist

Cite Share

New Creation

Commentary by Geri Parlby

Cite Share

We have been rid of all this through baptism, as through the Red Sea, so called because sanctified by the blood of the crucified Lord. (Augustine Sermon 223E.2)

This Christian sarcophagus is dated to the reign of Emperor Theodosius (379–95 CE) and is a detailed portrayal of the events that occurred as Moses led the Israelites across the Red Sea.

On the left, the pursuing Egyptian army are dressed as Roman soldiers and are led by Pharaoh who stands in a chariot on the exposed seabed (its wheels jammed, or soon to be; Exodus 14:25). A figure beneath the horses drawing the chariot is a personification of the Red Sea itself.

In the centre, the parted waters start to return and we see the Egyptians dramatically tumbling and drowning.

To the right of this, and viewing the destruction, stands Moses. Originally, he would have held in his right hand the staff he used to command the sea in parting and closing (Exodus 14:21, 26), but this is now lost. Nonetheless, like a vertical barrier, his body marks the point in the composition at which the chaos and violence of the waters come to an abrupt halt. Tumultuous waters are a frequent symbol in the Hebrew Bible for primal chaos: the formlessness from which God drew creation (cf. Genesis 1:2). Here, through Moses, God is again quelling the chaos and making a new beginning for his people.

Behind Moses gather the rescued Israelites. We see Moses’s sister, the prophet Miriam, playing a timbrel in celebration (Exodus 15:20), while just to her right is the (rather literally rendered) pillar of fire that lights the Israelites’ way at night (Exodus 13:21) and from which the Lord looks down from to throw confusion onto the Egyptians (Exodus 14:24). On the far right, a boy looks back to the perilous sea which he has safely crossed, his wrist held by a man who is carrying a burden which evokes Exodus 12:34, ‘So the people took their dough before it was leavened, with their kneading bowls wrapped up in their cloaks on their shoulders’.

Given the funerary context of this sarcophagus relief, the Crossing scene proclaims a robust hope: the transition from death to life; from chaos and violence to heavenly salvation.

Incorporation

Commentary by Geri Parlby

Cite Share

They forgot God, their Saviour,
who had done … terrible things by the Red Sea.
Therefore he said he would destroy them—
had not Moses, his chosen one,
stood in the breach. (Psalm 106:21–23)

This work is one of several versions of the Crossing of the Red Sea made by the Russian-born Jewish artist Marc Chagall. The theme was especially poignant for Chagall as he and his wife had had to flee France in 1941 after the Germans invaded.

This version of the scene was designed in 1950 as a ceramic mural for the baptistery of the Notre-Dame de Tout-Grâce church in the Plateau d’Assy in France. Sensitive to the purpose of the baptistery, Chagall worked with the typological link between the Red Sea Crossing and Christian baptism and salvation, a link whose origins go back to the New Testament itself: as Paul wrote to the Corinthians, ‘Our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea. And all in Moses were baptized, in the cloud, and in the sea’ (1 Corinthians 10:1–2).

In the mural, the Israelites are led from the sea by a graceful white angel (Exodus 14:19–20). At the head of the march, a bent old man leans on his stick, a symbol of the eternal wandering Jew, said by some to symbolize the biblical Cain condemned to wander the earth (Genesis 4:12). The Israelites are pursued by a chaotic army of Egyptians with Pharoah in his chariot urging them onwards into the sea and to their deaths (Exodus 14:26–31). A monumental Moses in bright yellow, with horns of light emanating from his head (Exodus 34:29), has his staff raised (Exodus 14:15–17). The bright yellow is reminiscent of the yellow badges Jews were forced to wear to identify their heritage.

Chagall’s mural also incorporates an image of Jesus, wearing a Jewish prayer shawl in place of the more typical loincloth. During his career, Chagall returned again and again to images of the crucified Jesus, using the crucifixion as a symbol for not just human, but specifically Jewish, suffering (see Chagall’s White Crucifixion and Yellow Crucifixion). Here, the central action unfolds between him and Moses; each revered in their traditions as a saving figure who ‘stood in the breach’ (Psalm 106:23).

References

Chagall, Marc. 2007. The Bible: Genesis, Exodus, the Song of Solomon (San Francisco: Chronicle Books)

Green, William C. (trans.). 1963. Augustine: The City of God, vol 6, books 18.36–20, Loeb Classical Library 416 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press)

Levine, K.A. (ed.). 2003. Marc Chagall (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)

Wilson, J. 2007. Marc Chagall (Jewish Encounters) (New York: Schocken Books)

Liberation

Commentary by Geri Parlby

Cite Share

[Christ’s blood] washes and cleanses [the soul] from its sins and transforms us from being the children of wrath into the children of God. This does not happen by the physical water but by the sprinkling of the precious blood of the Son of God, who is our Red Sea, through which we must pass to escape the tyranny of Pharaoh, who is the devil, and to enter the spiritual land of Canaan. (de Brès 1567)

In this painting by the Dutch Mannerist artist Cornelis van Haarlem, we see the Israelites making their way out of the parted waters of the Red Sea under a dark and menacing sky (Exodus 14:19–20). The small figure of Moses can be seen on the far left of the painting standing on a bluff accompanied by four figures. He appears to be holding back the waters effortlessly until the last of the Israelites walk from the dry sea bed (Exodus 14:21; 22).

Other Israelites, some dressed in the traditional contemporary style, others more exotically, talk and interact with each other on the other side of the painting. In the centre, a turbaned man in a figure-hugging outfit of vivid green stands with his arm around the waist of a woman in shadow. The couple appear to be greeting the new arrivals.

Cornelis’s use of bright and often jarring colours with highly stylized figures in twisted and unnatural poses—although a typical artifice of sixteenth-century Dutch Mannerism—could also be a deployment of visual caricature, reflecting contemporary prejudices about the 'gracelessness' of the Jewish people. John Calvin (1509–64) had projected just such a view of onto the ancient Israelites in his Commentaries on the Bible, criticising their lack of faith:

Now the Israelites, … though preserved by God’s hand, … reject as much as possible His proffered grace. (Calvin 1853)

Yet many of the Calvinist Dutch saw clear parallels between their fight against Spanish Catholic domination and that of the Israelites breaking free from Egyptian slavery. Despite anti-Jewish prejudice, they also felt a special kinship with the great biblical figures and they repeatedly drew parallels between the Israelite people and themselves:

[They] are an example to us how many repeated salvations are necessary for us, in order that God may bring us to perfect salvation. (Calvin 1853)

References

de Brès, Guido. 2007 [1567]. ‘Belgic Confessions 1567, Article 34’, in The Belgic Confession, ed. by N. Gootjes (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic)

Calvin, John. 1853. Commentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses Arranged in the form of a Harmony, vol. 1 (Calvin Translation Society)

Lowenthal, Anne Walter. 1977. ‘Three Dutch Mannerist Paintings’, Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University, 36.1: 12–21

Salvation By Water

Comparative commentary by Geri Parlby

Cite Share

The people … by passing through the Red Sea, proclaimed good tidings of salvation by water. The people passed over, and the Egyptian king and his host was engulfed, and by these actions this sacrament [of baptism] was foretold. For even now, whensoever the people is in the water of regeneration, fleeing from Egypt, from the burden of sin, it is set free and saved. (Gregory of Nyssa, On the Baptism of Christ)

The Crossing of the Red Sea is a dramatic episode in the book of Exodus and a pivotal moment in the sacred histories of both Christians and (especially) Jews.

It also features as one of the earliest identifiable narrative scenes in both Christian and Jewish art: the oldest surviving depiction of the scene was found in a Jewish synagogue in Dura Europos, in present day Syria, dated to the mid-third century CE.

A similar painted scene appears in a funerary context in the fourth-century Christian catacomb of the Via Latina in Rome—suiting the triumphal tone of much early Christian figurative art, which frequently celebrated moments of victory over danger and death.

Thus, the fourth-century marble sarcophagus in this exhibition is one of several coffins with reliefs of the Crossing of the Red Sea. In them we see the story of Pharaoh’s pursuit, the drowning of the Egyptian army, and the ultimate celebration of salvation by the liberated Israelites. The typological link between the Israelites’ passing through the waters and that undergone by Christians in baptism offers assurance that death has no ultimate power over the believer: in baptism they have already died with Christ, and will rise with him.

For sixteenth-century Calvinists, as for centuries of Christians before them, the Crossing of the Red Sea evoked a connection between baptism and spiritual cleansing. According to one of their most important doctrinal texts:

God signifies to us that just as water washes away the dirt of the body when it is poured on us and also is seen on the bodies of those who are baptized when it is sprinkled on them, so too the blood of Christ does the same thing internally, in the soul, by the Holy Spirit. (de Brès 1567)

But, as the same text goes on to say, the Crossing also signified an escape from tyranny into a new space of freedom. Although Cornelis van Haarlem was Roman Catholic, he was commissioned to paint this scene at a time when Dutch Calvinists were celebrating the emergence of their church from Spanish Catholic domination. The event of salvation depicted in this work must have seemed especially resonant in such a context. For many, the Egyptians would have recalled the Spanish Catholic Church whereas the promised land of Canaan represented the Calvinist Dutch Republic.

After his 1931 commission by the French art dealer Ambroise Vollard to illustrate the Bible—resulting eventually in two volumes containing 105 etchings—Marc Chagall continued to return to biblical subjects throughout his life. In revisiting some of these subjects, Chagall varied the media he used. He made both lithographic and oil-painted versions of the Crossing of the Red Sea in addition to this large ceramic mural composed of 90 tiles.

Chagall was commissioned to create the mural for the baptistery of the Notre-Dame de Tout-Grâce church in Plateau d'Assy, France. The episode was an informed choice for that location, because of the link between the sacrament of baptism and the story of the Red Sea crossing. The Church was consecrated in 1950 by the Dominican led Sacred Art Movement who—post-World War II—were seeking to revitalize church architecture through the contributions of the finest artists of the 1950s, regardless of their faith.

Despite already having painted many New Testament subjects in his biblical works, Chagall was uncharacteristically plagued by self-doubt when he first received the commission for the baptistry of the Plateau d’Assy Church. He even turned to both the chief rabbi of France and the president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, for reassurance that as a Jew it would be acceptable to take on the commission. In the event, he revised his earlier treatments of the Crossing by adding an image of the Crucifixion, and by doing this he reconciled the requirements of this very Christian commission with an expression of his own Jewishness—for in his previous work he had developed the image of the Crucifixion into a way of both highlighting and exploring the sufferings of the Jewish people.

By combining both Jewish and Christian symbolism in this Crossing of the Red Sea, Chagall harnesses not only the baptismal themes of new creation, and of liberation, but also of reconciliation: a new incorporation of divided traditions and peoples. He speaks powerfully of the possibility of a cohesive civilization in which Jews and Christians share key religious motifs.

References

de Brès, Guido. 2007 [1567]. ‘Belgic Confessions 1567, Article 34’, in The Belgic Confession, ed. by N. Gootjes (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic)

Schaff, Philip (ed.), W. Moore and H. Wace (trans.). 1893. ‘On the Baptism of Christ’, in Gregory of Nyssa Dogmatic Treaties etc., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers 2.5 (Christian Literature Company), p. 518, available at https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf205/npnf205/Page_518.html

Next exhibition: Exodus 15:20–21