A climactic moment in the Exodus narrative comes in this week’s Torah reading of B’shalaḥ (Exodus 13:17-17:16). Just after God finally and definitively saves the Israelites from their Egyptian oppressors at the Sea of Reeds, Moses leads the people in a song of thanksgiving. This is the first of two or three such poems in the Pentateuch; indeed, in the narrative portion of the Hebrew Bible that extends from Genesis through the second book of Kings, it is one of only a handful of passages where the authors abandon prose. Like the other instances, the Song at the Sea presents an alternate version of a story that has already been relayed in prose. In doing so, it raises new perspectives, both literary and religious, that the biblical text as a whole might otherwise lack.