His word was our arrow, His breath was our sword.
Who shall return to tell Egypt the story
Of those she sent forth in the hour of her pride?
For the Lord hath looked out from His pillar of glory,
And all her brave thousands are dashed in the tide.
Sound the loud timbrel o’er Egypt’s dark sea!
Jehovah has triumphed, His people are free!”
Miriam must have been exempt from the infirmities of age to a remarkable degree, to be able at her advanced years to lead the host of Hebrew women and maidens in the music and songs of triumph and general rejoicings over the mighty deliverance out of the hand of Pharaoh on the farther shores of the Red Sea. The victory, however, was such a marked one, and the deliverance so great as to cause old age, for the time being, to be swallowed up in the youth of praise and thanksgiving.
Taking up their line of march from the shores of the Red Sea, we do not learn anything farther concerning Miriam until Hazeroth is reached. Here she seems to have been the instigator of an insurrection against Moses. In some respects it must have been grievous to him, all the more so, from the fact that Aaron had also suffered himself to be carried away by his sister’s fanaticism. By virtue of their office as prophet and prophetess, in the minds of the people, they held almost equal rank with Moses.
The occasion of this insurrection was a marriage which Miriam regarded as objectionable, though, notwithstanding, she had the example of Joseph, who married an Egyptian woman, before her, and which marriage did not prove to be antitheocratic. Moses had married a Cushite. It is true the prohibition to marry with the daughters of other than their own people had special reasons of religious self-preservation, and for that reason the High Priest was allowed to marry only a Hebrew virgin, but that was a limitation belonging to his symbolic position. The prophetic class, on the other hand, had the task of illustrating the greatest possible letting down of legal restraint. The union of Moses with this Cushite may have symbolized the future calling of the Gentile nations, a sort of first fruit, as Rahab and Ruth later on proved to be, and it offers a remarkable parallel that the next greatest man of the law, Elijah, lived for a considerable time as the table companion of a heathen widow of Zarephath.