Kommentar zu Schemot 15:8

וברוח אפיך AND WITH THE BREATH OF THY NOSTRILS — the breath that issues from both nostrils. Scripture speaks — if this were at all possible (i. e. if one may be permitted to speak so of God) of the Shechina (God) in the same manner as it does of a human monarch, in order to make peoples’ ears hear the facts in accordance with what usually happens to that they may understand the matter: when a man is angry the breath issues from his nostrils (and Scripture attributes this to God, also, when He is in anger). A similar idea is: (Psalms 18:9) “Smoke rose up in His nostril”, and also, (Job. 4:9) “By the breath of his nostril they are consumed”. And this is the meaning of what He said, (Isaiah 48:9) “For My name’s sake אאריך I will make long My אף”: when one’s anger subsides his breathing becomes long, whilst when one is in anger his breathing is short (consequently אאריך אפי signifies “I will not be angry”). The text continues ותהלתי אחטם לך which means “for the sake of My praise I will place a nose-ring in My nose to close up the nostrils against the anger and the breath so that they should not issue forth”. The word לך, for thee, in this text, means “for thy sake”, אחטם has the same meaning and root as in “a wild camel with a nose-ring (חֹטֶם)” which occurs in Mishna Treatise Sabbath (Mishnah Shabbat 5:1). Thus does the explanation appear to me. And wherever אף and חרון (i. e. where אף and words formed from the same root as חרון) occur in the Scriptures I say that it has the following sense: In the phrase חרה אף the first word is the same as (Job 30:30) “My bone is חרה with heat”, where חרה denotes burning and glowing, and this metaphor is used because the nostrils become hot and burning in a time of anger. The noun חרון is a derivation of חרה, just as רצון is a derivation of רצה, and therefore signifies “burning”. In the same way, חַמה which also signifies wrath really denotes heat (from a root יחם, not חמם, since the מ of חַמָה has no Dagesh. חַמָה is formed from יחם as עֵדָה, congregation, from יעד). That is why Scripture says, (Esther 1:12) וחמתו בערה בו “his wrath burned in him”, and when one’s wrath subsides one says, “his mind has become cooled” (נתקררה from קר cold).

וברוח אפיך נערמו מים, now Moses speaks of the third war G’d conducted against the multitudes of Egypt; (not the elite) Moses recapitulates the phenomena faced by the Egyptian hordes when the waters which had previously been normal became like towers of frozen water in the midst of the sea.

נערמו מים, גצבו כמו נר, "the waters were piled up, stood upright like a wall." This verse describes three distinct activities performed by G'd when He split the sea. 1) The waters split and remained in one place as a heap so as to make a path available for the Israelites to cross. 2) The waters which would normally replace the newly created vacuum in the centre of the sea did not spill into that vacuum but piled up along the sides forming a veritable wall. 3) As already mentioned in my comments on 14,21 it was not the entire depth of the sea which was split, but the deeper layers of water were frozen so as to enable the Israelites to march through relatively high ground and not to have to descend to what had been the bottom of the sea. The expression קפאו, "were frozen already," reflects what we have said earlier that the freeze of the lower waters in the sea preceded the splitting of the upper levels of the sea. The expression לב ים refers to the lower level of the sea which froze. The reason that the Israelites again used the word תהומות in the plural was that G'd made them travel along twelve separate lanes, each tribe having a lane to itself as we know from Shemot Rabbah 24,1.