after the manner of a proper name; so that the inference drawn by Knobel on Exo 8:18 from the absence of the article, that סוּף is the name of a town on the northern point of the gulf, is groundless. The miracle at the sea of sedge or sea-weed - as Psa 106:12 says - also was not without effect. Exo 14:31 tells us that they believed on Jahve and Moses His servant, and the song which they sang follows in Ex. 15. But they then only too quickly added sins of ingratitude.
Verses 13-23
The first of the principal sins on the other side of the Red Sea was the unthankful, impatient, unbelieving murmuring about their meat and drink, Psa 106:13-15. For what Psa 106:13 places foremost was the root of the whole evil, that, falling away from faith in God's promise, they forgot the works of God which had been wrought in confirmation of it, and did not wait for the carrying out of His counsel. The poet has before his eye the murmuring for water on the third day after the miraculous deliverance (Exo 15:22-24) and in Rephidim (Exo 17:2). Then the murmuring for flesh in the first and second years of the Exodus which was followed by the sending of the quails (Ex. 16 and Num. 11), together with the wrathful judgment by which the murmuring for the second time was punished (Kibrôth ha - Ta'avah, Num 11:33-35). This dispensation of wrath the poet calls רזון (lxx, Vulgate, and Syriac erroneously πλησμονήν, perhaps מזון, nourishment), inasmuch as he interprets Num 11:33-35 of a wasting disease, which swept away the people in consequence of eating inordinately of the flesh, and in the expression (cf. Psa 78:31) he closely follows Isa 10:16. The “counsel” of God for which they would not wait, is His plan with respect to the time and manner of the help. חכּה, root Arab. ḥk, a weaker power of Arab. ḥq, whence also Arab. ḥkl, p. 111, ḥkm, p. 49 note 1, signifies prop. to make firm, e.g., a knot (cf. on Psa 33:20), and starting from this (without the intervention of the metaphor moras nectere, as Schultens thinks) is transferred to a firm bent of mind, and the tension of long expectation. The epigrammatic expression ויּתאוּוּ תאוה (plural of ויתאו, Isa 45:12, for which codices, as also in Pro 23:3, Pro 23:6; Pro 24:1, the Complutensian, Venetian 1521, Elias Levita, and Baer have ויתאו without the tonic lengthening) is taken from Num 11:4.
