Exodus 14:31
And they saw the Egyptians dead upon the sea shore, and the mighty hand that the Lord had used against them: and the people feared the Lord, and they believed the Lord, and Moses his servant.
Open Exodus 14:31 in the Motif Searcher, word by word across all five texts →Show on the spiral →The verse in its languages
- Vulgate (Clementine)
- Et viderunt Ægyptios mortuos super littus maris, et manum magnam quam exercuerat Dominus contra eos : timuitque populus Dominum, et crediderunt Domino, et Moysi servo ejus.
- Septuagint (Swete)
- ἴδεν δὲ Ἰσραὴλ τὴν χεῖρα τὴν μεγάλην, ἃ ἐποίησεν Κύριος τοῖς Αἰγυπτίοις· ἐφοβήθη δὲ ὁ λαὸς τὸν κύριον, καὶ ἐπίστευσαν τῷ θεῷ καὶ Μωυσῇ τῷ θεράποντι αὐτοῦ.
- Hebrew (WLC)
- וַיַּ֨רְא יִשְׂרָאֵ֜ל אֶת הַיָּ֣ד הַגְּדֹלָ֗ה אֲשֶׁ֨ר עָשָׂ֤ה יְהוָה֙ בְּמִצְרַ֔יִם וַיִּֽירְא֥וּ הָעָ֖ם אֶת יְהוָ֑ה וַיַּֽאֲמִ֨ינוּ֙ בַּֽיהוָ֔ה וּבְמֹשֶׁ֖ה עַבְדּֽוֹ
Haydock's commentary
Sea-shore. The Hebrews would thus again be enriched by their spoils. (Calmet)
Servant. Those who believe God, submit to the directions of his ambassadors. (St. Jerome in Philemon 5.) In this merited catastrophe of the Egyptians, which fixed the last seal to the mission of Moses, the fathers contemplate how God's servants are rescued by baptism, and by the merits of Jesus Christ, from Satan and from all sin. (1 Corinthians x. 1, 4; Origen, hom. 5.) (Haydock)
From Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary, 1859, in the transcription made by Todd Easton and kept online by John Paul Wohlschied at johnblood.gitlab.io/haydock.
The Fathers on this verse
Tertullian On Repentance, Final Considerations to Induce to Exomologesis
If you shrink back from exomologesis , consider in your heart the hell, which exomologesis will extinguish for you; and imagine first the magnitude of the penalty, that you may not hesitate about the adoption of the remedy. What do we esteem that treasure-house of eternal fire to be, when small vent-holes of it rouse such blasts of flames that neighbouring cities either are already no more, or are in daily expectation of the same fate? The haughtiest mountains start asunder in the birth-throes of their inly-gendered fire; and, which proves to us the perpetuity of the judgment, though they start asunder, though they be devoured, yet come they never to an end. …
St Augustine Lectures or Tractates on the Gospel According to St. John, Chapter I. 15-18
19. Expel, therefore, from your hearts carnal thoughts, that you may be really under grace, that you may belong to the New Testament. Therefore is life eternal promised in the New Testament. Read the Old Testament, and see that the same things were enjoined upon a people yet carnal as upon us. For to worship one God is also enjoined upon us. “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain” is also enjoined upon us, which is the second commandment. “Observe the Sabbath-day” is enjoined on us more than on them, because it is commanded to be spiritually observed. For the Jews observe the Sabbath in a servile manner, using it for luxuriousness and drunkenness. How much better would their women be employed in spinning wool than in dancing on that day in the balconies? God forbid, brethren, that we should call that an observance of the Sabbath. …
St Basil De Spiritu Sancto, Objection that some were baptized unto Moses and believed in him, and an answer to it; with remarks upon types
31. But even if some are baptized unto the Spirit, it is not, it is urged, on this account right for the Spirit to be ranked with God. Some “were baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea.” And it is admitted that faith even before now has been put in men; for “The people believed God and his servant Moses.” Why then, it is asked, do we, on account of faith and of baptism, exalt and magnify the Holy Spirit so far above creation, when there is evidence that the same things have before now been said of men? What, then, shall we reply? Our answer is that the faith in the Spirit is the same as the faith in the Father and the Son; and in like manner, too, the baptism. But the faith in Moses and in the cloud is, as it were, in a shadow and type. …
St Basil De Spiritu Sancto, Objection that some were baptized unto Moses and believed in him, and an answer to it; with remarks upon types
33. But belief in Moses not only does not show our belief in the Spirit to be worthless, but, if we adopt our opponents’ line of argument, it rather weakens our confession in the God of the universe. “The people,” it is written, “believed the Lord and his servant Moses.” Moses then is joined with God, not with the Spirit; and he was a type not of the Spirit, but of Christ. For at that time in the ministry of the law, he by means of himself typified “the Mediator between God and men.” Moses, when mediating for the people in things pertaining to God, was not a minister of the Spirit; for the law was given, “ordained by angels in the hand of a mediator,” namely Moses, in accordance with the summons of the people, “Speak thou with us,…but let not God speak with us.” Thus faith in Moses is referred to the Lord, the Mediator between God and men, who said, “Had ye believed Moses, ye would have …
The Fathers are given as they wrote. Where a passage lays the Passion on the Jewish people, the Church teaches that it cannot be charged against all the Jews then living, nor against the Jews of today, and that all sinners were its authors (CCC 597, 598).