And were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea;
All Commentaries on 1 Corinthians 10:2 Go To 1 Corinthians 10
Cornelius a Lapide
AD 1637
And were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea. See Exodus 14. The passage of the Red Sea is a type of baptism, in which we are reddened with the blood of Christ, and drown the Egyptians, viz, our sins. Moses is a type of Christ; the cloud is the Holy Spirit, who cools the heat of lust and gives us light. Theodoret says: "Those things were typical of ours. The sea stood for the font, the cloud for the grace of the Spirit, Moses for the priest, his rod for the cross. Israel signified those who were baptized; the persecuting Egyptians represented the devils, and Pharaoh himself was their chief."
Unto Moses as the legislator signifies, according to some, that the Hebrews were initiated into the Mosaic law by a kind of baptism when they passed through the sea. So we are baptized into Christ or initiated and incorporated into Christ and Christianity, by baptism. Hence in Exod. xiv, after the account of the passage through the sea, it is added, "They believed the Lord and His servant Moses."
But our baptism was not a type of the baptism of the Hebrews in the Red Sea, but, on the contrary, theirs was a type of ours. Moreover, in this passage the Hebrews were not initiated into the law of Moses, for they did not receive it till they reached Sinai.
I say, then, that since the Apostle frequently puts into for in, it is more simple to understand the phrase to mean through Moses, or under his leadership. So Ephrem, Chrysostom, Theophylact take it. The sense, then, is: all the Hebrews were baptized by Moses spiritually and typically, or bore the type of our baptism, in that, when they saw the sea divided by Moses, and Moses passing through it before, they, as Chrysostom says, also ventured to trust themselves to the sea, and that in the cloud, that Isaiah , under the guidance and protection of the cloud going before then, and in the sea, viz, in which the Egyptians were drowned, and through which they passed from Egyptian slavery to liberty and newness of life, just as we pass through the waters of baptism from the service of the devil to the Kingdom of Christ. So Anselm, Chrysostom, Ambrose, Theophylact.
Notice, too, with Chrysostom, that the Scriptures give the name of the type to the antitype, and vice vers. Here the passage through the Red Sea is called a baptism, because it was a type of one. Hence ver6 is explained, where he says, "These things were our examples."
