Sermon Tone Analysis

‌7:17- The 10 Signs are very purposefully structured.

There are 3 triads and then the 10th plague, with organization apparent in several forms.

The 1st , 4th , and 7th signs begin with Moses out for a walk when he meets Pharaoh.

The 2nd , 5th , and 8th begin with Moses’ warning Pharaoh in the palace.

And the 3rd , 6th , and 9th happen without any warning.

The first three also happen in the morning.

Aaron is the main character in the first triad, then he and Moses split the activity in the second, then it’s all Moses in the third.

‌“Only in the first triad is Aaron with his outstretched staff the executor of the plagues. . . .

Cassuto also observes that the plagues are equally arranged in pairs: two involving the Nile, two plagues of insects, two epidemics affecting beasts and humans respectively, two plagues devastating the crops, and the final darkness paired with the death of the firstborn.”

-Robert Alter, Translation and Commentary

Isn’t it fascinating how blood can represent life or death, and the difference is entirely on whether it exists in the body or out of the body.

Why do you think God chose this first sign?

I know God is God and He can do whatever He wants, but He’s dealing with humans.

A sign has to make sense for it to be a sign.

Why would He do this?

Was it just a cool party trick?

Was it a cruel joke so they couldn’t get a morning bath?

I believe there were three primary reasons.

First, He’s doing to Egypt what Egypt did to Israel.

The water being blood was a horrifyingly vivid picture of all the blood of the Israelite babies sent to their deaths in the river.

God is doing to Pharaoh what Pharaoh did to Israel, but He’s giving Egypt chances to change.

Second, the priests needed to bathe to stay ritually pure.

These signs will consistently gnaw away at the priests’ abilities to serve their gods.

Third, this sign would have had significance within Egyptian mythology.

‌“The event has three analogues in Egyptian texts.

Tale of Ipuwer: The Tale of Ipuwer (ca.

1650-1550 B.C.E.), which laments the chaos that has engulfed Egypt, claims: “The river is blood.

If one drinks of it, one rejects it and thirsts for water… Foreign tribes have come to Egypt.”

As in the biblical text, the Egyptian story describes a bloody Nile and a defeat at the hand of foreigners.

A Demon of Bastet: A ritual text that identifies one of seven demons of the goddess Bastet (here a manifestation of Sekhmet) as “The one who is in the Nile-flood who makes blood” (924-889 BCE).

As Thomas Schneider observes: “This could be understood as a demon who creates carnage in the Nile, and thus turns the Nile into blood ( Exod 7:17-20 ).” 4

Tale of the Heavenly Cow: “[The Egyptians] had a story called the Cataclysm of Ra in which Ra’s daughter, the goddess Hathor, was called on to punish humanity for not worshipping Ra like they were supposed to.

So, she decided to wipe out all of humanity, but Ra didn’t like that because he still wanted people to rule, so With the help of his faithful followers, Ra arranged for large quantities of beer to be mixed with red dye or pomegranate juice so that it would look like blood.

Then they brought seven thousand jars of beer and poured the contents on the fields, flooding the fields where Hathor would return to continue her slaughter.

The next day, when Hathor returned to eliminate the rest of the humanity, she saw the large pool of blood.

She started drinking from it until she became so drunk that she couldn’t remember why she was sent there, and when she returned to her father, Nun, she slept for many days.”

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‌“As a result of this myth, during the festivals of Hathor and Sekhmet, people would drink beer blended with pomegranate juice in celebration of the salvation of mankind.

The festival was also linked to the flooding of the Nile, which every year would turn the color of blood as silt was carried upstream.”

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‌Whether or not this was actual blood is debated.

Some suggest the water was just turned red.

(I have read from some that the ancient Egyptian word for red could also mean blood, but I haven’t been able to verify that.)

But that likely wouldn’t explain why the water was undrinkable.

Others have suggested the red coloring was some sort of poisonous algae that colored the water.

I bring this up here because some people try to explain each of the signs as natural phenomena.

While I do believe God can and does use natural phenomena to work, these signs are specifically called miracles.

To me, that means God likely stepped in and do some supernatural.

There could be some connection like bloody water sending the frogs on land which allowed the insect population to increase which led to the burning rash.

But I don’t usually build out those connections too much.

For a perspective on how the plagues could have been natural occurrences, read https://www.livescience.com/58638-science-of-the-10-plagues.html.

‌7:18- Consider how traumatizing this would be for the average Egyptian who had no clue what was going on.

‌7:19- “Many construe this as a reference to wooden and stone vessels or receptacles, but the plural form ‘etsim suggests trees rather than wood.

In any case, trees and stones as objects in nature accord better with the catalogue of bodies of water that precedes than would household utensils.

It has also

been noted that the Hebrew pairing here, ‘etsim wa’avanim, is often used to refer to the material out of which idols are made.”

-Robert Alter, Translation and Commentary

7:22- The author of the text assumes that the sorcerers actually did the same sign as Moses here without feeling the need to explain how exactly they did it.

We don’t know how they created the same sign.

We don’t even know where they got the pure water to do it.

On that note, where did Egypt get water at all? Humans can go roughly 3 days without water, but we’re going to see in a few verses that this sign lasted a whole week.

I highly doubt every single Egyptian had a week’s supply of water stored in their houses.

Did they have large vats, like an ancient water tower that the government rationed out?

We have no clue.

Verse 22 seems to imply all water in Egypt turned to blood, but verse 24 suggests water found from wells could be safe.

‌7:23- At this point, Pharaoh can just retreat to his house to escape reality.

That’s about to change in the next sign.

‌7:25- This verse makes it sound like it took 7 days for the Nile to return to normal.

God gave the Egyptians a week to get the picture.

Also, seven days?

Don’t miss the Genesis 1 language here.

Just as God worked for 6 days at Creation and rested on the seventh, so He works this sign of de-creation for 6 days and offers rest on the 7th .

It’s worth noting that if you’re reading in Hebrew, the chapter continues through verse 4 of the next chapter.

Exodus 8:5 is Exodus 8:1 in Hebrew.

8:1- Up until this point, the Israelites had been serving Pharoah.

Now they’d serve Yahweh.

It’s the same verb.

‌8:2- Why frogs?

Frogs are amphibians.

They blur the lines between land and sea.

They “represent the undoing of this ordered separation.

Yahweh is returning Egypt to a state of disorder and chaos in judgment for their evil.”

-The Bible Project

‌8:3- “The verb in the Hebrew is transitive (“will swarm frogs”).

Several commentators have noticed that this word choice echoes the “swarming” of the proliferating Hebrews in chapter 1. There, the orgy of propagation seems to have struck the Egyptians as repellently reptilian; here, they are assaulted with a nauseating plague of amphibians.

In this, as in other details of the Plagues narrative, the allusions to the Creation story, initially sounded in the first chapter of Exodus, turn into a network of reversals of the original creation.

It would be excessive to insist that every detail of the narrative, or even every plague, confirms this pattern.

Nevertheless, the allusions to early Genesis that are detectable trace a possibility that much exercised the imaginations of the biblical writers: if creation emerged at a particular moment in a process with discriminated stages, one could imagine an undoing of this event and this process, apocalypse being the other side of the coin of creation.

The benign swarming of life in Genesis turns into a threatening swarm of odious creatures, just as the penultimate plague of darkness, prelude to mass death, is a reversal of the first “let there be light.”

-Robert Alter, Translation and Commentary

‌Remember how Pharoah could escape to his home during the last plague?

Not anymore.

Now the frogs are in his palace as well.

‌8:4- This literally reads, “into you.”

Whether that’s literal or a quirk of grammar, it’s gross.

‌8:5- Did Moses and Aaron have to do this once or over multiple bodies of water?

The text isn’t 100% clear on that.

8:8- This is the first concession of Pharoah in the story.

How desperate he must have been to ask for intercession before Yahweh!

The last time someone interceded to Yahweh in the Biblical narrative, it was Isaac because his wife Rebekah was infertile.

‌8:9- “The Hebrew ‘vaunt over me’ is a little odd.

The construction of the consensus of commentators, medieval and modern, which seems plausible, is that Moses is offering Pharaoh the limited ‘triumph’ of choosing the moment when the plague will cease.