Note that this verse has three lines in parallel: the waters piled up—the floods stood up—the deeps congealed. At the blast of thy nostrils is literally “by the wind of your nostrils.” This figure of speech is what is called an anthropomorphism, meaning that God is described as though he were a human. So this suggests the vivid picture of Yahweh blowing through his nose to divide the waters (see 14.21); so Good News Translation translates “You blew on the sea.” The waters is simply the plural form of “water.” Piled up is a word used only here, but it suggests the meaning of being heaped or dammed up. So Good News Translation has “piled up high,” and Contemporary English Version has “piled up like a wall.”

The floods comes from the word “to flow.” Here it is parallel with waters and deeps, so one can say “flowing waters” (New American Standard Bible) or “surging waves” (Translator’s Old Testament). Good News Translation weakens the parallel pattern by simply using the pronoun “it,” referring to the singular “water” in the first line. Stood up in a heap is literally “they stood just like a ned,” but the meaning of ned is not certain. So translations vary: “wall” (New Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh, New International Version), “bank” (Revised English Bible), “dyke” (New Jerusalem Bible), “mound” (New American Bible), “stack” (Durham), and “hill” (Childs). Any of these are possible. Contemporary English Version combines the parallelism of the first two lines and translates “that the sea piled up like a wall.”

The deeps is the same word translated as “floods” in verse 5. (See the comment there.) Congealed means to thicken or become solid. New Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh has “The deeps froze,” but this should not be understood literally; it is only a description of a supernatural event. Some languages may need to say “they became like frozen…,” changing the metaphor to simile. In the heart of the sea is literally what the Hebrew says, meaning “in the midst of the sea” (New American Bible). Good News Translation combines the terms in this line: “the deepest part of the sea became solid.” This does not refer to the sea bed but to the “deepest part” of the water. In using a simile, however, the translator needs to use a comparison that is natural in the receptor language.

Quoted with permission from Osborn, Noel D. and Hatton, Howard A. A Handbook on Exodus. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 1999. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .