Biblica_1:Layout 1 21-11-2011 12:59 Pagina 321 Eisodus as Exodus: The Song of the Sea (Exod 15) Reconsidered In an essay that appeared in a previous volume of this journal, I suggested that the Song of Deborah (Judg 5) preserved what I termed pseudo-mythopoeic concepts regarding the defense of the Israelite highland settlements against lowland urban Canaanite cul- tures in the early Iron Age 1. In that essay, I argued that the chariot imagery in Judg 5 connected the Canaanite army of Sisera to mem- ories of Egyptian mechanisms of conquest from the Bronze Age that lingered in Israelite memory as an ideological allergen. In this way, Canaanites were understood as manifesting Egyptian imperial culture of an earlier era, and the defense against the encroachment of these lowland Canaanites was characterized as an ongoing strug- gle against the specter of Egypt. I further noted that these concepts may have been the generating circumstances for the growth of the Exodus myth as Israelite religion developed in subsequent peri- ods 2. In the present study, I wish to extend this line of inquiry in relation to another poetic work often connected to Judg 5 on both formalistic and thematic grounds and pivotal to the Exodus tradi- tion in the Biblical record, i.e., the Song of the Sea (Exod 15). Exod 15 provides us with a window into how the pseudo- mythopoeic concepts evident in Judg 5 eventually became a full- blown liturgical myth 3. Though a significant number of scholars in recent years have made cogent cases for Exod 15 as a composition dating from the late pre-exilic period or even later 4, many still view this text as an early example of Israelite liturgical poetry due to its 1 M. LEUCHTER, “‘Why Tarry The Wheels of His Chariot? (Judg 5,28): Canaanite Chariots and Echoes of Egypt in the Song of Deborah”, Bib 91 (2010) 256-268. 2 LEUCHTER, “Canaanite Chariots”, 268. 3 F.M. CROSS, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cambridge, MA 1973) 120-123 [henceforth abbreviated as CMHE] has already noted the cultic na- ture of the poem. The following discussion does not contest the cultic context for the recitation of the poem but suggests a different mechanism whereby the cult acted as a conduit for the experiences enshrined in the Song of Deb- orah to form into Exod 15. 4 See among others H. SPIECKERMANN, Heilsgegenwart. Eine Theologie