“Then Miriam the prophet, Aaron’s sister, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women followed her, with timbrels and dancing. Miriam sang to them:
‘Sing to the Lord, for he is highly exalted. Both horse and driver he has hurled into the sea.’” Exodus 15:20
Moses and the Israelites had just finished singing this song of praise to the Lord in Exodus 15:1–18. Immediately afterward, Miriam the prophetess picked up the lyrics to the tune and repeated the song in 15:21. This redundancy may feel tedious to the modern reader, but something profound was transpiring. The people sang Moses’s song of praise to the Lord. The song of Miriam the prophetess was sung from the Lord back to the people. Why was that important?
Let’s recall Israel’s deliverance. In stage one, God promised to deliver them: “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and he will pursue them. But I will gain glory for myself through Pharaoh and all his army” (Exodus 14:4). In stage two, God delivered them. The deliverance was confessed out of the mouth of God’s enemies, “Let’s get away from the Israelites! The Lord is fighting for them against Egypt” (Exodus 14:16). In stage three, the people of Israel gave thanks and praise for God’s deliverance (Exodus 15:1–18). And finally, in stage four, Miriam retold the story of the Lord’s deliverance (Exodus 15:21). They had witnessed God’s miraculous power, praised Him for it, and gave testimony to the next generation.
If you experience deliverance and then praise the Lord for that deliverance, you give God a single praise offering. If you experience deliverance and you educate the next generation, you get an offering of praise and worship from every generation that hears your testimony and walks in the same power for themselves. By educating a community in the power of God’s character, the prophet unites a community’s history to their destiny: the unchanging God can do for you what He did for your ancestors.
The Israelite community was an oral culture, committing the song of Miriam to their collective memory. As an oral culture, they practiced regularly looking over their shoulders and remembering the stories of where they came from. They were chronicling their victory for future generations to remember. We could say that every generation stands on the shoulders of the one before it, accumulating the wisdom of the ages.
If you have a song of Moses without a song of Miriam, the move of God dies within a generation. But if you have a prophetic voice, like Miriam’s, reminding the people of the mighty acts of the Lord, you impact every generation after. An experience without an education and activation leads to stagnation. An experience that results in education and activation leads to accumulation. Miriam was activating Israel’s living memory of God into a faith that believed in His ongoing and intervening love.
Through the Exodus story, God was redeeming His people. Through Miriam the prophetess, God was redefining Israel’s identity. Not only is the Spirit of the Lord delivering us, but He is also reinterpreting our story—who we belong to and what we put our trust in. John Locke, no stranger to Christianity, observed, “Whoever defines the word defines the world.” Through the prophetic voice of Miriam, God was reorienting His people around His love and His power. We need the prophets and prophetesses who hear the living voice of the Lord, remind us of God’s power, and stir up the faith to believe in His ongoing and intervening love.
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