(א) בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֵֽינוּ מֶֽלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם אֲשֶׁר קִדְּ֒שָֽׁנוּ בְּמִצְוֹתָיו וְצִוָּנוּ לַעֲסֹק בְּדִבְרֵי תוֹרָה:
(1) Blessed are You, Adonoy our God, Ruler of the Universe, Who sanctified us with commandments and commanded us to be engrossed in the words of Torah.
(כ) וַתִּקַּח֩ מִרְיָ֨ם הַנְּבִיאָ֜ה אֲח֧וֹת אַהֲרֹ֛ן אֶת־הַתֹּ֖ף בְּיָדָ֑הּ וַתֵּצֶ֤אןָ כׇֽל־הַנָּשִׁים֙ אַחֲרֶ֔יהָ בְּתֻפִּ֖ים וּבִמְחֹלֹֽת׃ (כא) וַתַּ֥עַן לָהֶ֖ם מִרְיָ֑ם שִׁ֤ירוּ לַֽיהֹוָה֙ כִּֽי־גָאֹ֣ה גָּאָ֔ה ס֥וּס וְרֹכְב֖וֹ רָמָ֥ה בַיָּֽם׃ {ס}
(19) For the horses of Pharaoh, with his chariots and horsemen, went into the sea; and Hashem turned back on them the waters of the sea; but the Israelites marched on dry ground in the midst of the sea. (20) Then Miriam the prophetess, Aaron’s sister, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her in dance with timbrels. (21) And Miriam chanted for them:
Sing to Hashem, for She has triumphed gloriously;
Horse and driver She has hurled into the sea.
AND MIRIAM THE PROPHETESS, THE SISTER OF AARON. The correct interpretation appears to me to be that because Moses and Miriam were mentioned in the Song and Aaron was not, Scripture wanted to mention him. It therefore said the sister of Aaron as a mark of honor to him, i.e., that he was her older brother and that his sister the prophetess connected her genealogy to him, since he too was a prophet and a holy man of G-d. It is possible that it is the custom of Scripture to trace the genealogy of a family through the oldest brother.
כי בא סוס פרעה, the opening words of this song had been inspired by the spectacle of Pharaoh with his chariot, his horses and its riders drowning in the sea at the time when the Israelites, by contrast, were taking their time walking through the same sea on dry ground. ביבשה בתוך הים, they began the song of thanksgiving even before all had emerged from the sea to the shore.
מרים הנביאה, “Miriam the prophetess;” the word “prophetess” is used here to describe Miriam’s extraordinary ability to use words to express her feelings. According to Rash’bam, the word is also used as describing someone who preaches to people to behave morally and ethically correctly.
שירו לה' כי גאה, “raise your voices in song to Hashem, for She has been triumphant;” the women sang the whole of Moses’ song, word by word; seeing that the text had already been recorded, the Torah does not need to repeat all of it and mentions only the beginning.
Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai (book)
...important religious roles were sometimes available to individual women. On the other side, however, whatever they tell us of women's religious power, the stories of exceptional women also allow us to glimpse a process of textual editing through which the roles of women are downplayed and obscured. Miriam, for instance, is called a prophetess. As the one who leads the women in a victory dance on the far shores of the Red Sea, she is clearly an important religious figure in the preconquest Israelite community...
The same passages that hint at Miriam's importance, however, at the same time undercut it. The dance at the Sea links Miriam with a foundational event of Israelite history, but she appears in the narrative with no introduction and no account of her rise to religious leadership. This surprising silence suggests that there were other Miriam traditions that were excluded from the Torah....
Naima Hirsch, "Parshat Beshalach: An Ode to Miriam", https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/parshat-beshalach-an-ode-to-miriam/
While it is certainly empowering to read Miriam’s dancing as an amplification of Moshe’s song on the women’s side of the proverbial mechitzah, it is also an oversimplification of her leadership. In the moments after [the splitting of the sea], Miriam stepped into a new role as a leader of the Israelite people just as they became a people, as only someone who watched as her baby brother was miraculously pulled from the edge of the Nile could.
She heard the same questions Moshe did – What now? Where do we go from here? and she rose to usher her people through it with song, dance, and thanks to God.
Prof. Carol Meyers, "Miriam’s Song of the Sea: A Women’s Victory Performance", https://www.thetorah.com/article/miriams-song-of-the-sea-a-womens-victory-performance
Taken together, these texts specifying drum-dance-song performance represent a distinct women’s tradition. Even when all three of these elements are not mentioned, the presence of all three would have been understood. Indeed, studies of traditional songs suggest an organic performance tradition, with movement (dance) and rhythm (drums) along with words constituting a compositional whole.
In this case—the Song of Miriam and similar texts involving dancing, drums, and song—the performance genre is a victory-song tradition associated specifically with women. Women are the ones left behind when armies go out to battle, and thus they are the ones to celebrate the return of warriors. In its ancient cultural context, the Song of the Sea would have been sung by women—Miriam and her cohort—celebrating YHWH’s defeat of Israel’s enemies. In fact, from the accounts of Miriam, Deborah, Jephthah’s daughter, and Judith, we get a picture of women as leaders of musical groups.
וילכו שלשת ימים, “they walked for a period of three days;” when the Israelites had left Egypt they had taken vessels containing drinking water with them. As soon as they ran out of water they raised their voices complaining (verse 24) Instead of displaying a minimum amount of patience, they complained immediately. An alternate interpretation: the expression וילכו שלשת ימים במדבר ולא מצאו מים, is an allegory; the people had been hoping to find Torah=מים=life sustaining water, but were sorely disappointed not to have found it, so they complained. In Isaiah 55,1, Torah has been equated with water. This is the reason why Ezra introduced the custom to read publicly from the Torah every Monday and Thursday, so that the people would not have to go without listening to a Torah reading for three successive days. (Talmud, tractate Baba Kamma, folio 82)
Rabbi Shai Held, "Leaving Slavery Behind: On Taking the First Step", https://www.hadar.org/torah-resource/leaving-slavery-behind#source-402
Think for a moment about a slave’s existence. Robbed of dignity and freedom, the slave has no agency, no capacity to shape her own fate. She does as she is told, lest she be beaten or dehumanized further. And although she works hard, she is passive, because in no sense is she the author of her own life. In order to go from slavery to freedom—in order to be truly transformed, in other words—the Israelites will need to discover, however slowly and painfully, that they have agency, that they can act in ways small and large to determine their own fate. Angry, afraid, longing for the familiar, they cry out to God and lash out at Moses.