Biblica_1:Layout 1 21-11-2011 12:59 Pagina 336 336 MARK LEUCHTER The poet thus utilizes Canaanite mythic topoi, but the content is unique to Israelite understandings of the cosmic battle YHWH con- tinually fights on their behalf 60. The image is not of an actual sea- side skirmish but, rather, an understanding of the fate of defeated Canaanite aggressors against hinterland Israel and the divine cause of their defeat. Thus there is a dialectic relationship between form and content in Exod 15, for just as the poem relates YHWH’s defeat of Egypt, the poet himself defeats his people’s own Egypto-Canaan- ite social/cultural patrimony by rejecting the standards of their mythology. The semantics and semiotics of the poem hurl both Egypt and Canaan into the primordial waters of chaos, cosmically dismantling and dissociating them from Israel. Indeed, the poet himself hints at this meta-literary dynamic early in his composition, equating YHWH’s indomitable power with the very act of singing or reciting the hymn itself (h(w#yl yl yhyw hy [y]trmzw yz( in v. 2) 61. As C. Kloos notes, the schematic structure of the song repeatedly equates the praising of YHWH (e.g., reciting a victory hymn such as the poem) with the defeat of the enemy 62. It is not only YHWH’s defeat of Egypt-as-enemy that constitutes the making of Israel, then, but the actual commemoration of this mythic event. Israel would consistently be reborn through the recitation of a poem that spelled out, in the purest terms, the basic ideas that empowered it into being. The need to reconnect with this ideology on a regular basis was no doubt catalyzed by the fact that even though Egypt lost full control of Canaan at the end of the Bronze Age, it maintained a presence in the region as well as an in- terest in eventually reclaiming it 63. Thus, all enemies and threats mythic typology with the character in question. In the case of Yael, it is the typology of the Canaanite deity Anat, cf. S.A. ACKERMAN, Warrior, Dancer, Seductress, Queen. Women in Judges and Biblical Israel (New York 1998) 51-64. In Exod 15,4-5, the device is utilized to forge a new understanding of My as a mechanism of YHWH’s power rather than the object of it. 60 So also RUSSELL, Song, 41-42. 61 On the emendation of the MT of trmzw, see W.H.C. PROPP, Exodus 1- 18 (AB; New York 1996) 471-472, 511-513. PROPP’s analysis of the term and its place in the poem suggests that the poet was indeed employing a dou- ble-entendre regarding its etymological implications and its role as part of a liturgical hymn. 62 KLOOS, Yhwh’s Combat, 138. 63 STAGER, “Forging an Identity”, 90.