At the blast of breath of your nostrils the waters piled up; the floods stood up in a heap; the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea. The enemy said, ‘I will pursue; I will overtake; I will divide the spoil; my desire shall have its fill of them. I will draw my sword; my hand shall destroy them.’ You blew with your breath; the sea covered them; they sank like lead in the mighty waters.
Exodus 15:8-10
When Jesus breathed on his disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit,” (John 20:22), he brought to mind a couple of episodes in the Old Testament. First, God formed Adam from the dust of the ground breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (Genesis 2:7). Second, the prophet Ezekiel envisioned the whole house of Israel as a valley of dry bones, brought back to life by the breath of God (Ezekiel 37:1-14). In Jesus, God is creating humanity anew and reconstituting a restored and renewed Israel.
This morning, I discovered another allusion to God’s breath in the pages of Exodus. Exodus 14:21 simply states that God drove the sea back by a strong east wind, dividing the waters and allowing the Israelites to pass through the sea on dry ground. In the poetry of Exodus 15:8-10, however, the wind is explicitly identified with the breath of God. Psalm 18 uses the same imagery in an allusion to Israel’s crossing the Red Sea.
Then the channels of the sea were seen, and the foundations of the world were laid bare at your rebuke, O LORD, at the blast of the breath of your nostrils.
Psalm 18:15
Wind, breath, and spirit are all the same word in Hebrew and Greek, allowing the Biblical authors to play with this imagery.
Here, God’s breath is blown from his nostrils. In a recent video, Carmen Joy Imes noted that the Old Testament’s many references to God’s nostrils are a way of talking about God’s wrath, so much so that “nostrils” can be a synonym for anger. The same breath, however, creates life and at the Red Sea gives birth to a nation. God’s anger at sin and injustice is one aspect of his creative and life-giving activity.
The Exodus story, then, recalls a different part of the creation narrative. In the opening verses of Genesis, a wind from God (or the Spirit of God) swept over the face of the primordial waters, and God separated the waters causing dry land to appear. As a recapitulation of these events, the Exodus itself was a kind of new creation.
In John, Jesus’ words have many layers of meaning. When Jesus said, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit (breath/wind)” (John 3:5), was this (among other things) an allusion to the Exodus by which God gave birth to his people Israel and (eventually) led them to enter the promised land?
Mitchell Lewis 