Hello and welcome to the Scriptures A Real podcast, a podcast where we talk about elements of the scriptures that have become real to us and real in our lives because we believe there's power in the scriptures and we want to draw as much of that power into our lives and the lives of our families as possible.

I'm your host, Kerry Mealstein, and this will be a shortcast where we talk about one of my favorite chapters in Scripture, and that is Exodus Chapter 15.

It's known as the Song of the Sea, because it's the song about what happened in the Red Sea.

And this is very old Hebrew.

When you read this in Hebrew, it's very clear that it's

older than most Hebrew. I know this one fairly well. This actually was one of the chapters that was on

my PhD Hebrew exam. And I had to translate this one. And it's tricky because it is much older.

And that's a clue that this really is an old song.

What we have are two songs, and one's a long one by Moses.

That's the first several verses.

And then we get verse, going in verse 20, and Miriam the prophetess also sings,

and we just have a short line from her. But in any case,

typically poems and songs are frozen in time the way that they were when they were composed,

and we don't change them. So, for example, Shakespeare. We do Shakespeare, even though that's

really old English for us, not as old as this Hebrew is, but really old English for us.

We do it the way it was written because that's how it was written.

Same thing with Beowulf, even older.

But it's a poem, so you don't change a poem.

If you want to change a story, if you retell a story, then you can update that into your own language and say it in your own words.

But a poem or a song, you leave the way it is and it stays old.

So this is a very, very old one.

And I suspect it comes to this the way it actually was when it was first composed.

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