Chapter 9:17-10:10
Commentary:
9:17- “The meaning of the Hebrew verb here has long been in dispute. This translation presumes a connection with the military term, ‘siege-ramp,’ which might imply that Pharaoh is keeping the Hebrews penned in as a besieging army would do to the population trapped within a city.” - Robert Alter, Translation and Commentary
9:19- “The beasts are a little puzzling because verse 6 clearly reports a total destruction of Egyptian livestock. Perhaps all the reports of general destruction are meant to be taken as hyperboles; in any case. . . this narrative. . . is chiefly focused on conveying a sense of grand cumulative catastrophe.” -Robert Alter, Translation and Commentary
One other possible option is that perhaps the Egyptians stole the Israelite’s cattle that had been left unharmed.
9:20- “Elsewhere, [fearing the word of Yahweh] is an idiom that indicates piety (as in ‘God- fearing’), but here the idiom has been stripped down to its literal meaning: whoever was struck with terror by this grim threat of God’s took the necessary steps to protect his slaves and livestock. The existence of a contingent of Egyptians now genuinely terrified by the dire predictions of the Hebrews is an indication of developing cracks in the pharaonic front.” -Robert Alter, Translation and Commentary
9:23-24- While hail alone had first been threatened, now there is thunder (literally, a voice) and fire. Some have suggested a miraculous flaming ball of ice or balls of fire raining down along with the hail, but this could also be referring to lightning.
9:27- “The terrifying display of celestial violence for the first time triggers a confession of wrongdoing from Pharaoh (and the terms ‘in the right,’ and ‘in the wrong,’ reflect legal usage). But ‘this time’ is restrictive, as though Pharaoh were suggesting: I did nothing to offend before now, but I admit, in the face of the destruction hurled from the heavens, that this time I have done wrong.” -Robert Alter, Translation and Commentary
9:30- “Moses appears to be shrewdly reading the grudging nature of Pharaoh’s admission, ‘I have offended this time.’ And Pharaoh’s reversal of direction after each of the previous plagues scarcely inspires confidence that he has now undergone a change of heart. The phrase ‘you still do not fear the LORD God’ neatly straddles both senses of the idiom (see the comment on verse 20); Pharaoh is far from fearing the LORD, as Moses recognizes, in the sense of pious submission to divine authority. He does fear the LORD’s destructive power—that is why he is pleading with Moses—but probably not sufficiently to prevent him from renewing his obduracy.” -Robert Alter, Translation and Commentary
9:31- Scholars remind “us that flax was used to make linen, a principal Egyptian fabric for clothing (and also an important Egyptian export item), and goes on to suggest that the barley would have been used for cheap bread to feed slaves.” -Robert Alter, Translation and Commentary
9:33- Now rain is mentioned alongside the hail, thunder, and lightning.
10:1- Notice that the text says God made the hearts of, not just Pharoah, but also his servants heavy. This is the first time this has been said of someone other than Pharoah in the story. Servants is a generic word that can mean anything from slaves to administrators/advisors. In this case, the second option seems to make the most sense.
10:2- “The rationale of establishing God’s enduring fame shifts here from the global scope of
Exodus 9:16 (“that My name be told through all the earth”) to a consideration of educating the future nation. . . . The particular importance of the Exodus story is that it served as the foundational narrative for the nation.” -Robert Alter, Translation and Commentary
10:3- Humility and humbling (humiliating) other people form a minor theme in Moses’ story. Pharoah had been humbling Israel for 400 years. Moses would soon be called the humblest man on earth. Yet Pharoah refused to humble himself before this foreign God.
“These words are a translation into other terms of the just announced hardening of Pharaoh’s heart by God, and thus constitute a strong indication that events caused by God and events flowing from human will, or willfulness, are merely different biblical ways of accounting for the same phenomenon. It should be noted that the language God directs to Pharaoh through Moses and Aaron has become more confrontational: now Pharaoh is inveighed against not only for blocking Israel from fulfilling its obligations to God but for failing to humble himself before God—humble submission being the last thing the supreme monarch of Egypt would imagine he would ever have to do.” -Robert Alter, Translation and Commentary
10:4- Even now, God is giving Pharoah a whole night to change his mind.
10:5- Many preachers and commentators have seen “face” or “surface of the earth” and assumed that the locusts covered the entirety of Egypt. That seems highly unlikely. Can you imagine how many locusts it would take to cover the whole land? In the name of Biblical literalism and inerrancy, many jump through hoops trying to defend this as possible. But another meaning is more likely and entirely possible given the actual meaning of the Hebrew words. The word almost always translated as “face” or “surface” is literally “eye,” not “face.” The face of the earth makes us think of the land as a whole. But the eye? What could the eye of the land be?
Today we know that light enters into our eyes, allowing us to perceive the world around us. But in an ancient mindset, lights comes out of the eye. So what would be the eye of the earth? The sun. The Bible isn’t saying that locusts covered the entirety of the ground. They covered the sun. It’s not that you couldn’t see any land. You couldn’t see the sun. The Egyptians would have been wondering if Yahweh killed Ra, the Egyptian god of the sun.
Another point regarding Biblical literalism is worth being made here. In our circles, we can be very fast to say we take the Bible literally, but such a blanket statement doesn’t leave any nuance for words. And what one person might consider as the obvious plain reading of a text may not be what someone else thinks of. The KJ and a few other translations say that the locusts covered the face of the earth. Some people might take that to mean the locusts were over the whole world, covering the entire globe. Others might say it means the known world at the time (excluding the Western Hemisphere). But the word usually just means “land,” as in the land of Egypt. And per the previous paragraph, that doesn’t even mean land in the sense of “ground.” It’s land in the sense of geographic region. That’s still taking the Bible literally. We just have to take the time to learn what the literal meaning would have been to someone from that culture who spoke that language, rather than immediately jumping at the first connotation an English word brings to our minds.
10:6- Like with the sign of the frogs, there is no escape in the palace for Pharoah.
Notice the little mic drop on Moses’ part. He’s getting bolder, snarky even. He doesn’t give Pharoah a chance to respond. He just walks out.
10:7- The rest of Egypt is getting the picture, but Pharoah is still holding his ground.
10:8- “Now, after the courtiers conclude their rebuke to Pharaoh with ‘Do you not yet know that Egypt is lost?’, the Egyptian king appears to concede the justice of their argument and has Moses and Aaron brought back into his presence. It is noteworthy, however, that Pharaoh’s agency, coerced and grudging, is left rather vague by the passive construction (‘were brought back’)—presumably, Pharaoh issued the order, but perhaps he merely acquiesced as his courtiers sent after Moses and Aaron.” -Robert Alter, Translation and Commentary
“His acceptance of their petition expresses itself in an impatient imperative, quite in keeping with the ‘How long will this fellow be a snare’ of his courtiers.” -Robert Alter, Translation and Commentary
10:9- “Moses, at this point fully confident that God has dealt him the stronger hand, responds to Pharaoh’s implied reservation uncompromisingly. In a reversal of their initial speech postures, it is now Pharaoh who speaks in brief, unadorned sentences, and it is Moses who deploys quasipoetic parallelism—lads and old men, sons and daughters, sheep and cattle—in a rhetorical flourish that makes it plain he will yield in nothing.” -Robert Alter, Translation and Commentary
At the end of Jacob’s life, Joseph and his family hold a rather elaborate funeral for him, leading a procession out of Egypt along a scenic route back up to Canaan. The account in Genesis 50 is full of little hyperlinks to our current story in Exodus. The details don’t make much sense in Joseph’s story, so it’s likely they’re added in as foreshadowing of what would come 400 years later. For example, Genesis 50:8 mentions the rather strange detail that the children and animals were left in Goshen while Joseph led the rest of his family on the funeral procession. That’s probably not something you were wondering about when you read the story. You likely didn’t even remember that little aside being there. But the matter of whether or not the children and animals join the rest of the people is a major point of importance in the showdown between Moses and Pharaoh. Even before the Israelites were enslaved, the text was pointing us ahead to how the story would go.
10:10- “The effect is sarcasm: that is, as much as I am prepared to send off your little ones may the LORD be with you—which is not at all.” -Robert Alter, Translation and Commentary
“These words are ambiguous. The most likely meaning is ‘You are headed for mischief,’ i.e., embarked on a scheme to escape with all the Hebrew slaves, but it could also mean something like ‘Harm is going to befall you.’ Some commentators have detected in the word for mischiefharmevil, ra‘ah, a pun on the name of the Egyptian deity Re or Ra.” -Robert Alter, Translation and Commentary