Scripture Study

We carry water in plastic bottles now, almost as carelessly as we carry our keys. It arrives through pipes. It gleams behind refrigerator glass. We have made water so convenient that we have forgotten it is not a utility but a miracle, one we have simply learned to bill monthly. It is the difference between a garden and a grave.

Israel, newly escaped from Egypt and stumbling into the terrible school of Sinai, understood this. In the ancient Near East, water meant life, fertility, and the nearness of divine favor. Flowing water, mayim chayyim, “living water,” was not merely useful. It was an image of heaven breaking into barrenness, of God stooping to touch dust and make it bloom.

That is why the water narratives in Exodus matter so deeply. They are not mere travel notes. They are theology in story form: the education of a covenant people learning, slowly and with much complaint, that the God who parted the sea can also lead a thirsty people to water.

Mortality is a wilderness, and yet we still behave as though thirst were an insult. We know what it is to leave one bondage only to find ourselves in a dry land we do not understand, to be delivered and yet still disoriented, redeemed and yet still thirsty. Scripture does not flatter us with easy maps. It gives us signs instead: a bitter spring, a tree, an oasis, a rock, a fountain. In the hands of the Lord, the wilderness of Israel becomes a map of the soul. As Alma taught, “this life became a state of probation” (Alma 12:24), and probation, by its nature, is dry country. One learns there what one is really thirsting for.

The Bitter Cup

The first great thirst after the Red Sea comes at Marah. The scene in Exodus 15 is psychologically exact. Three days into the wilderness, Israel finds water and discovers that it is bitter. Hope rises, then collapses. The very thing that promised relief becomes a torment.

How often does life do exactly that, lifting the cup to our lips and filling it with bitterness?

Ancient Jewish interpreters lingered over that bitterness. Some assumed the water was literally brackish. But others read more deeply. Certain rabbinic traditions suggest that the water was not the only bitter thing present. The people themselves were bitter. Having come out of generations of bondage, they still saw the world through Egypt’s eyes: every new thing a threat, every mercy a possible fraud. Their bitterness was not merely a wound they carried; it was a posture they preferred.

So, the bitter water at Marah becomes more than a physical crisis. Israel tastes outwardly what it has chosen to be inwardly.

And then comes one of the most haunting images in the whole Exodus account: “the Lord shewed him a tree” (Exodus 15:25). Moses casts the wood into the waters, and the bitter becomes sweet.

The Jewish tradition often linked this tree to the Tree of Life. Proverbs calls wisdom “a tree of life” (Proverbs 3:18), and some ancient readers saw in the wood at Marah a figure of Torah, the divine word that sweetens what sin and suffering have made undrinkable. Early Christians saw in it a type of the Cross. Both instincts are profound, because both recognize the same principle: God’s answer to bitterness is not a theory but a tree.

But the tree must be received. Moses cast the wood into the water, yes, but Israel had to drink. The sweetening was not a spectacle performed at a distance. It was an invitation that required the mouth, the throat, the willingness to take in what God had offered.

For Latter-day Saints, the symbolism reaches further still. Lehi, too, was led through a wilderness. Nephi, too, speaks of a dark and dreary waste. And at the center of that vision stands the Tree of Life, whose fruit is “most sweet, above all that I ever before tasted” (1 Nephi 8:11).

Then Nephi gives us one of the most luminous keys in all of scripture: he speaks of “the tree of life” and “the fountain of living waters” almost interchangeably (see 1 Nephi 11:25). The sweetness of the tree and the life of the water are both gathered up in the love of God manifest in Christ. The angel’s own question, “Knowest thou the condescension of God?” (1 Nephi 11:16), suggests that the tree is itself a kind of stooping, a bending down of heaven toward the parched earth.

Consider, too, what Alma says of the word of God: “it beginneth to enlarge my soul; yea, it beginneth to enlighten my understanding, yea, it beginneth to be delicious to me” (Alma 32:28). The language is Marah redeemed. What was bitter becomes delicious. What was poison becomes nourishment. The experiment upon the word that Alma describes is, in miniature, the casting of the tree into the waters. It requires desire, a place given in the heart, a willingness to act and to taste. The word does not enlarge the soul that refuses it. It enlarges the soul that receives.

Marah, then, reaches past the brackish springs of Sinai. It is about the Lord’s power to heal the bitterness we have chosen to live in, through the Tree that reveals the love of God. He rarely lifts us out of the wilderness. More often, He transforms the one wandering through it.

There are griefs He does not erase, losses He does not explain in the moment of their weight. But He invites us to meet those griefs differently, to enter them with Him rather than against Him. He can make bitter water drinkable; not by pretending it was never bitter, but by changing what we bring to the cup. By grace, and by our willingness to hold the wound before Him, He can make even that wound a well.

Immediately after Marah comes Elim, and the whole scene feels like an exhale after agony: “twelve wells of water, and threescore and ten palm trees” (Exodus 15:27).

The Ordered Oasis

Scripture rarely wastes numbers. Twelve and seventy are covenant numbers. The twelve evoke the tribes of Israel. The seventy call to mind the elders of Israel and the fullness of witness-bearing ministry.

Some Jewish traditions imagined each tribe receiving its appointed spring, as though Elim were not merely abundance but ordered abundance, hospitality with form. This is characteristic of God. He does not simply open a tap and walk away; even His abundance has a shape. One thinks of the Lord’s own declaration: “mine house is a house of order, saith the Lord God, and not a house of confusion” (D&C 132:8). Even His oases have architecture.

And then there are the palm trees. In the desert, palms are not decorative. They are testimony. They mean that somewhere, hidden beneath sand and stone, water is present. They are witnesses with leaves on them. They do their preaching simply by refusing to die.

For Latter-day Saints, the typological beauty is hard to miss. The Doctrine and Covenants says that the Seventy “are also called to preach the gospel, and to be especial witnesses unto the Gentiles and in all the world” (D&C 107:25). In a dry land, the palms are witnesses that water is near, signs that the desert is not godforsaken, that one ought to keep walking.

Yet Exodus is careful: it is not seventy wells and twelve palms. It is twelve wells and seventy palms.

The Seventy bear witness widely, beautifully, indispensably. They stand on the horizon-line of the Church as signs of life in the desert. But the twelve wells correspond to the ministry of the Twelve Apostles, whom the Lord calls “special witnesses of the name of Christ in all the world” (D&C 107:23). The Apostles are not the source of living water. Christ alone is that source. But in the ordered economy of the covenant, the Twelve are stewards of the springs. Through priesthood keys, doctrine, and ordinances, they do not stand between the Saint and Christ. They clear the way. They point to the water and say, Drink.

This does not diminish the Seventy. A palm tree in the desert is not a trivial thing. It is hope made visible. Witness with bark on it. But palms point beyond themselves. They signal that one should press on to the wells.

Water from the Wrong Place

Marah teaches that the Lord can sweeten the bitter heart that will let Him. Elim teaches that the Healer provides ordered refreshment through covenant witness and stewardship. Then comes Rephidim, where the lesson deepens again.

Here there is no water at all. No bitter spring. No oasis. Nothing.

The people quarrel. They ask, in effect, the great question hidden beneath all human panic: “Is the Lord among us, or not?” (Exodus 17:7).

The Lord’s answer is astonishing. Moses is commanded to strike the rock, and water pours forth. He does not guide Israel around barrenness. He brings abundance out of the place least likely to yield it.

Paul gives the typological fulfillment with characteristic boldness: “that Rock was Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:4). He even speaks of the Rock as somehow following Israel through the wilderness. Paul is doing something bolder than explanation. He is telling us that Christ was Israel’s life all along. The water from the rock was geological wonder and gospel at once.

The Book of Mormon confirms this with a directness that Paul, writing to Corinthians steeped in Greek philosophy, could scarcely use. Jacob declares plainly: “we knew of Christ, and we had a hope of his glory many hundred years before his coming; and not only we ourselves had a hope of his glory, but also all the holy prophets which were before us” (Jacob 4:4).

Moses at Rephidim was not performing a water trick. He was enacting a prophecy. He was striking the figure of the One who would be struck for us all, and from whose wounds living water would flow. As the Psalmist sang, “He clave the rocks in the wilderness, and gave them drink as out of the great depths” (Psalm 78:15). The verb is violent. Clave. The Lord broke open stone to give drink to the ungrateful, and He would do it again at Calvary. The Rock was not destroyed by the striking. It was revealed by it.

The Rock Was Christ

Here the whole drama of living water gathers into one Person. At Marah, He is the Tree that sweetens bitterness. At Elim, He is the hidden source beneath every true palm and every appointed well. At Rephidim, He is the Rock struck for thirsty people.

No wonder He can later stand in Jerusalem and cry, “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink” (John 7:37). No wonder He tells the woman at Jacob’s well that the water He gives becomes “a well of water springing up into everlasting life” (John 4:14). Scripture has been preparing us for this all along. The Lord of Exodus is the Christ of the Gospels, and the Christ of the Gospels is the God of the Restoration, who declared to Joseph Smith: “I am the light and the life of the world” (D&C 11:28).

Still in the Wilderness

And we are still in the wilderness.

That fact must not be sentimentalized. Mortality is not a quaint camping trip with inspirational scenery. The desert does not become less terrible because someone has printed it on a bookmark.

There are Marah seasons when everything one reaches for tastes bitter, and when we must ask ourselves whether the bitterness is in the cup or in the hand that holds it. There are Rephidim seasons when there seems to be no water at all, when the heavens feel like brass and prayer seems to go up only far enough to strike the roof-beams.

If faith means anything serious, it must mean something there: in the dry places, in the silence, in the seasons when the rock looks like only a rock. Not as a way of managing discomfort, but as a way of being in the world that refuses to let the desert have the final word.

But the witness of scripture is that the wilderness is not empty. It is crowded with signs for those who have learned how to see. There is the tree. There are the palms. There are the wells. There is the rock. And there is Christ, still present in the desert, still making sweetness in bitter places, still causing streams to break out from flint.

“For I will go before your face,” He told the early Saints. “I will be on your right hand and on your left, and my Spirit shall be in your hearts, and mine angels round about you, to bear you up” (D&C 84:88). That is not a metaphor. It is a wilderness promise, spoken by the same God who struck the rock at Rephidim.

The Tree Is the Fountain

The Book of Mormon gives latter-day readers an especially precious grace here. Nephi’s vision refuses to let us separate what we are always trying to pull apart: love, life, nourishment, Christ. The tree is the fountain. The fountain is the love of God. The love of God is manifest in the Son. The whole vision presses the images together until we can no longer separate love from life, or Christ from the nourishment of the soul.

A man dying of thirst does not need a lecture on hydrology. He needs water.

“Come unto me all ye ends of the earth,” the risen Christ commands in the Book of Mormon, “buy milk and honey, without money and without price” (2 Nephi 26:25). The invitation is not to a lecture hall. It is to a spring.

Come and Drink

To partake of living water in our own wilderness wandering is to come to Christ where He has appointed Himself to be found: in scripture, in covenant, in sacrament, in the ministry of prophetic witnesses, in the quiet mercies by which He keeps turning deserts into places of encounter. It is to refuse the lie that the world is only machinery and the soul only chemistry. It is to remember that we live in a world where rocks can become fountains, trees can heal water, and palm trees can preach.

But it is also to remember that living water must be drunk. It must be taken in. The spring does no good to the man who stands beside it and will not kneel.

The ancients knew that if you saw palms on the horizon, you had reason to hope. Scripture teaches us to look with that kind of sanctified sight. The world sees only sand; faith sees witness. The world sees only rock; faith expects a spring. The world sees only bitterness; faith remembers the tree.

The wilderness of mortality is real, but it is not godless. The Lord has planted His signs here. He has appointed His witnesses. He has caused living water to flow here still. And if we will follow the witnesses, receive the sweetness of the tree, and drink from the Rock who is Christ, we may discover what Israel discovered at Elim: that the desert was never empty after all. It was always a place where heaven had hidden its wells.