Beshallach: The Song at the Sea

From "Miriam's Song at the Seat: A Women's Victory Performance by Prof. Carol Meyers at https://www.thetorah.com/article/miriams-song-of-the-sea-a-womens-victory-performance
Who Wrote the Song of the Sea?
Exodus attributes the poem to Moses, with Miriam’s rendition considered an antiphonal response. But a number of considerations support the possibility that, from a tradition historical perspective, the poem was Miriam’s before it was Moses’.
First, whereas the poem begins with the first-person verb, אָשִׁירָה “I will sing,” the prose introduction says that “Moses and the Israelites,” not Moses alone, sang the song. Moreover, it refers to הַשִּׁירָה הַזֹּאת “this song”—not “his song” or “Moses’ song.” Thus, the biblical text itself is not so clear about attribution.
Secondly, the view that Exodus 15:21 is antiphonal is based on the assumption that the verb introducing the poetic snippet in verse 21 means “answer.” However, the verb there, וַתַּעַן, may be a merger of proto-Semitic *ʿny, “answer,” and *ǵny, “sing” (like Arabic ǵny and Syriac ‘ny) and often refers to music or singing (e.g., Numbers 21:17). Moreover, the Greek translation (Septuagint) of Exodus15:21 translates וַתַּעַן as “led them in song.”^[7] Thus what Miriam sings is not characterized as an antiphonal answer but rather her own song.
In fact, more than half a century ago, two leading biblical scholars, Frank Moore Cross and David Noel Freedman, both experts in biblical poetry, argued that the [long] hymn in Exodus 15 should be designated “The Song of Miriam.” They hold the ascription to her in Exodus 15:20–21 as superior and assert that it is easier to conceive of the long poem being re-attributed to a great leader (Moses) than to “explain the association with Miriam being secondary.”^[8]
These points, as well as the existence of a Dead Sea Scroll fragment attributing an extended song to Miriam, suggest that the Song of the Sea should really be attributed to Miriam.^[9] Indeed, the very presence of the beginning (that is, the title) of Miriam’s song in the Masoretic Text indicates that the tradition of her authorship was so powerful that it could not be completely edited out, even as editors or redactors associated the entire poem with Moses to heighten his apotheosis.^[10]
Genre and Performance: A Woman’s Song
Another reason to connect the Song of the Sea to Miriam is its genre as a woman’s song. The genre can be identified as a performance tradition characterized by three elements in 15:20: a song accompanied by hand-drum and dance (בְּתֻפִּים וּבִמְחֹלֹת). These three elements appear in several other biblical texts and one extra-biblical text—always with women as performers. . .
A Woman’s Tradition
Taken together, these texts specifying drum-dance-song performance represent a distinct women’s tradition. Even when all three of these elements are not mentioned, the presence of all three would have been understood. Indeed, studies of traditional songs suggest an organic performance tradition, with movement (dance) and rhythm (drums) along with words constituting a compositional whole.^[16]
In this case—the Song of Miriam and similar texts­­ involving dancing, drums, and song—the performance genre is a victory-song tradition associated specifically with women. Women are the ones left behind when armies go out to battle, and thus they are the ones to celebrate the return of warriors.^[17] In its ancient cultural context, the Song of the Sea would have been sung by women—Miriam and her cohort—celebrating YHWH’s defeat of Israel’s enemies. In fact, from the accounts of Miriam, Deborah, Jephthah’s daughter, and Judith, we get a picture of women as leaders of musical groups.
Women and Drums
Consideration of the vocabulary for musical instruments in the Hebrew Bible sheds additional light on this genre and on women’s role as musicians, specifically drummers. The Hebrew Bible actually has a rich vocabulary of musical terms, especially ones denoting musical instruments. Musicologists have divided them into four categories,^[18] listed here with the number of different types mentioned in the Hebrew Bible:

1. Chordophones: stringed instruments; at least nine different ones (e.g., kinnor, lyre).^[19]
2. Aerophones: wind instruments; about a dozen of these (e.g., shophar, horn).^[20]
3. Idiophones: instruments that produce sound when parts of it strike each other; five examples (e.g., pa‘amonim, small bells).^[21]
4. Membranophones; percussion instruments: only one, the toph (hand-drum or frame drum), likely the oldest type of musical instrument.

Small hand-held drum, often used in school music groups today. This example is ten inches in diameter. Those used in the Iron Age were probably somewhat smaller. Photo by the author.
The appearance of only one membranophone in the Bible, the hand-drum (toph), means that virtually every musical performance involved that instrument, for the beat of a percussion instrument was a fundamental part of any musical performance. And who played the drums in ancient Israel?
Although the Bible mentions nearly thirty different instruments, the gender of the musician playing them is noted only for hand-drums. This appear in the victory-song passages and in Psalm 68, in which a procession to the temple includes singers, musicians, and young women playing hand-drums.^{[22]
תהלים סח:כו} קִדְּמוּ שָׁרִים אַחַר נֹגְנִים בְּתוֹךְ עֲלָמוֹת תּוֹפֵפוֹת.
^{Ps 68:26} First come singers, then musicians, amidst maidens playing hand-drums.
Moreover, of the sixteen times the hand-drum appears in the Hebrew Bible, only five times does the text mention the musicians, and in all cases they are women.
A Woman’s Dance
Just as the hand-drum seems to have been a woman’s instrument, the Hebrew root ח.ו.ל, used for dance in the passages reporting women’s drum, dance, and song (Exodus 15:20; Judges 11:34; 1 Samuel 18:6; and Jeremiah 31:4), seems to refer to a women’s dance.
We see this root again in reference to the Shulamite woman in the Song of Songs:
^{שיר השירים ז:א} מַה תֶּחֱזוּ בַּשּׁוּלַמִּית כִּמְחֹלַת הַמַּחֲנָיִם.
^{Song 7:1} Why will you gaze at the Shulammite in the Mahanaim dance?"
Elsewhere, when men are dancing, the root is ר.ק.ד (e.g., 1 Chronicles 15:29).^[23] Women apparently moved horizontally in a specific kind of dance, likely a circle dance, whereas men moved vertically, leaping up and down.^[24]
Women and Their Drums: Archaeological Evidence
The connection between women (not men!) and drums is supported by archaeological evidence. Small clay figurines have been recovered at virtually every Iron Age site in the East Mediterranean. Many of them represent animals, but figurines representing humans are also common.^[25] A subset of the terracotta renderings of humans are those depicting musicians playing flutes, cymbals, lyres, and hand-drums.^[26] Nearly forty of the figurines of musicians depict drum-players, and to the best of my knowledge, virtually all of those percussionists are women.^[27]
Today men dominate as percussionists; not so in the ancient Levant, where women were the drum players as sole accompanists to musical performances or as part of small ensembles of musicians. . .
Concluding Comments
In sum, because only women played the toph, all the biblical passages that mention performances involving drums and other instruments must denote ensembles that were either all female (as when dance, using ח.ו.ל, is also mentioned; see Psalms 149:3; 150:4) or were mixed gender.^[30] In the former case, when practicing together, women formed groups and provided opportunities for women leaders.
The Song of the Sea is a prominent biblical example of a woman’s performance genre. Its attribution to Miriam means that this powerful and perhaps earliest message about God’s power used to save the people is given voice by a woman.
The placement of Miriam’s song after the full version associated with Moses may seem to cede unwarranted credit to the male leader, but at the same time it forms the literary function of enveloping the first major section of the book of Exodus (Exodus 1–15:21) within woman-centered texts—from the twelve women who figure prominently in the opening chapters of Exodus (Shiphrah, Puah, Moses’ mother, his sister [Miriam], Pharaoh’s daughter, and the seven daughters of the priest of Midian)—to the ringing words of Miriam in Exodus 15.^[31]