[Avodah] "Zeh Keli v'anveihu Elokei avi va'arom'menhu"

[Michael Makovi]

> When the Israelites saw that they had been rescued from Pharaoh's army at
> the sea, they sang out with gratitude: "zeh Keli v'anveihu Elokei avi
> va'arom'menhu" This is my God and I will glorify Him; the God of my father
> and I will exalt Him.
>
> There are several questions that come up here. What is the difference
> between "...and I will glorify Him" and "...and I will exalt Him."  It seems
> like a repetition. Onkelos, Rashi, Ibn Ezra and Ramban all agree that...

I'm a Rabbi Yishmael sort of exegete. It seems to me that the Torah
speaks in the language of men (especially when it actually is quoting
men!), and since men speak in repetitions and parallelisms, etc., so
does the Torah.

Modern scholarship has found so many Near Eastern documents that speak
in the same manner as the Torah, that it seems difficult to me to
follow Rabbi Akiva's method of eliminating all (apparent) redundancies
and such. Unless we want to say that Hashem also wrote all the
non-Jewish Near Eastern writings that use the same patterns as the
Torah.

Besides, Rabbi Yishma'el's solution simply makes more sense to me.
Hashem gave the Torah to us to be understood by us and close to us,
not to be a puzzle of strange and perplexing patterns that we have to
struggle to make heads or tails of, and whose intended meaning
constantly contradicts the p'shat. (This last sentence will surely
provoke controversy against me, on the topic of when Chazal's exegesis
( = intended meaning) contradicts p'shat too, and the fact that Malbim
and others sought to show there is not really any contradiction. But
I'll deal with this later when someone makes an objection.)

Mikha'el Makovi