Psalms 114:5 → Joshua 4:23

Psalm 114:5 asks rhetorically "Why was it, O sea, that you fled, O Jordan, that you turned back?" — combining the Red Sea crossing and the Jordan crossing in a single poetic celebration. Joshua 4:23 makes the same explicit connection: "The LORD your God dried up the waters of the Jordan before you until you had crossed over, just as He did to the Red Sea, which He dried up before us until we had crossed over." Both texts interpret the Jordan crossing as a deliberate divine echo of the Exodus, with the shared vocabulary of waters fleeing (נוּס, nus) and turning back. The psalmist transforms Joshua's prose explanation into rhetorical poetry, addressing the waters directly. Psalm 114:7 supplies the answer to the question: the earth should "tremble at the presence of the Lord" (מִלִּפְנֵי אָדוֹן, millifney adon) — reframing the Jordan's waters, "cut off" (כָּרַת, karat) before the ark, as a theophanic display of God's sovereignty over creation rather than a merely logistical miracle.