John Calvin Commentary Exodus 14:1

"And Jehovah spake unto Moses, saying," — Exodus 14:1 (ASV)

And the Lord spoke unto Moses. God, by closing all the ways by which the Israelites might have escaped, now opens a way for His wonderful power. By bringing them for one moment to despair, He provided for the safety of His Church for a long time. This final act, then, marvelously illustrated the grace of God, so that the people, however ungrateful and disaffected they might be, should still acknowledge God as their deliverer. Moreover, its consequence was that with the forces of Egypt not only broken but the whole nation destroyed, or at least its flower extinguished, it brought no more trouble to the people until they were established in the land of Canaan.

If they had freely and peacefully gone out, with the king and the people of Egypt quiet, the former miracles would not have been sufficient to testify to their redemption. But when, being everywhere shut in, they see nothing but death before them, while the sea suddenly and unexpectedly provides them a passage and overwhelms their enemies pressing them from behind, they are obliged to confess that they were saved not only from death but from the deepest abysses by the hand of God.

But it appears that when they were commanded by Moses to throw themselves, and, so to speak, to engulf themselves in the narrow passage that has been mentioned, they were astonished by the miracles. They were like those who dream, since they obeyed without hesitation, although the very sight of the place must have filled them with horror. For if they had perceived danger, their readiness to obey would not have been so great, as we will soon see. Therefore, it was Moses' intention not so much to praise them as to praise the providence of God. For it is clear that unless they had been amazed by the many miracles they had seen, they could scarcely have been persuaded to willingly throw themselves into defiles from which there was no retreat.

From the word מגדל, migdol, we may conjecture that a fortress was built on the rock to prevent access to it.

I do not fully understand the meaning of החירת¹⁵¹hachiroth, nor do I see why the Greeks translated it as “the mouth of the valley;” yet from the word meaning “a mouth,” it can probably be conjectured that it was narrowed by piles.

Because the word חור, chor, means a cave or hole, I do not know whether the place might have gotten its name as “the mouth of the holes” or “caverns.” For the letter ו, vau, is often changed into י, yod, and a change of gender in the plural is common among the Hebrews.

Or perhaps some may think it more likely that, although it was written החירות, hachiroth, the letter ח was mistakenly substituted for ה due to their similarity. If we understand it this way, the feminine gender is used for the masculine, and it would mean “the mouth of the mountains.”

But even if we are ignorant of the etymology of the second word, the word “mouth” makes it certain that the defile was enclosed by rocks and had a narrow entrance. However, if I may offer my own judgment in a doubtful matter, I am more inclined to think that it is derived from the word חרת charath, which means to engrave or to furrow, because the rocks looked as if they were cut by a mallet. But on the opposite side, the place was surrounded by the sea, as though the Israelites had been thrown into a sepulcher.

¹⁵¹ פיהחירת C. has not borrowed anything from S.M. here. In Dr. Wilson’s “Lands of the Bible,” vol. 1, chap. 5, he has observed that if Pi-hahiroth is to be supposed to be a name given to the place, in the Hebrew tongue, it is well fitted to describe the mouth of the defiles, on emerging from which, the traveler comes in sight of the Red Sea, and enters on ground shut in between mountain barriers and that sea; but he also mentions that Gesenius has said, on the authority of Tablonski, that these syllables form the Egyptian name for a place where sedges grow. — W.