Exodus: Chapters 9 to 13

When we last left off, the plagues had begun.  Now, it's the rest of the plagues and the Passover, as Moses starts to lead the Israelis out of Africa.

CHAPTER 9

Well, if the pharaoh is still stupid, that means it’s time for another plague.  This one is pestilence upon all cattle.  Neither Aaron nor Moses does anything apparently.  There is just a date given to the pharaoh – it’ll happen tomorrow.  Sure enough, all Egyptian cattle live die and all Israeli cattle survive.

Time out – but the Israeli are the Egyptian slaves.  Why do they own their own cattle?  I can answer this one.  Slavery has variations across world history and different societies at different points in times had different roles for slaves. Heck, the Ottoman Empire had entire armies made up of slaves.  So you can have slaves owning property.  OK, but if things are really this bleak for Egyptians, you’d think they’d try to confiscate their cattle or something.  Eh, no matter.  The pharaoh remains unimpressed.  Why he isn’t, I can’t imagine. Because the plot requires it of him.

On to the sixth plague – boils.  The footnotes indicate it’s likely an inflammation, and it strikes all Egyptians.  There’s a bit of comedy here: “Because of the boils the magicians could not stand in Moses presence, for there were boils on the magicians.”  Heh.  Oh, how the mighty have fallen.  They’re no longer even trying to keep up with Moses and Aaron.  Instead, they’re just suffering with the rest while God runs laps around Egyptian gods.  Oh, and this time Aaron and Moses both jointly take action to begin the plague.  We’re starting to see formerly timid Moses start to enter into his prime. 

Well, the pharaoh is still a dick – wait, hold on a second.  The Bible flatly says, “The LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart.”  The Bible said something similar just before the plagues – that the LORD would intentionally make the pharaoh’s heart hard, and now he’s doing it.  Now, this isn’t so pleasant.  That is, well, that is a bit more morally murky.  If it’s the pharaoh on his own, then God is punishing him for being mean, but if God is making pharaoh be mean, then what justifies all of this?

Either way – the seventh plague is next: hail.  Sounds like God wants to big time everyone.  He says “But this is why I have let you [Egyptians] survive: to show you my power  and to make my name resound throughout the earth.”  Sounds like Walt White/Heseinberg in Season Five of Breaking Bad – “Say my name.”  Probably not a good thing that God is reminding me of Walt White. 

This hail is going to be a bad one.  All will die that are outside it – man and beast.  The pharaoh’s God fearing servants get their cattle under shelter, and the others don’t. We know how this plays out.  Problem: what about the average Egyptian who couldn’t get his cattle under shelter for logistical reasons or because he didn’t hear about this in time.  The Bible makes it an easy morality play – some ignored God – but it had to be more complex than that.

Well, now Moses is doing the plagues on his own.  No more Aaron – Moses makes the hail come, and it does the damage.  Naturally, the Israeli land is spared.  Much of the crops are destroyed, but apparently wheat is still an option for the Egyptians. 

Pharaoh gives the most self-serving backtrack in history.  He says the Lord is right and “I and my people are the ones at fault.”  You and your people?  You and your people?  Your people?  What the hell have they done, pal?  It’s your decisions, dummy.  (Actually, if this “Lord hardened pharaoh’s heart thing” is anything other than a rhetorical devise, wouldn’t that mean the Lord is partially to blame?)  Moses ends the hail with a neat trick – raises his hands to the LORD and everything stopped.  Neat party trick.  He’s really feeling this whole Lord’s prophet thing now. 

But, of course, pharaoh reneges.

CHAPTER 10

This chapter begins with some of the most morally questionable moments in the Bible.  The Lord flatly says he’s engineering this.  That “Lord hardens the pharaohs heart” theme isn’t just a rhetorical motif.  The LORD says to Moses: “Go to Pharaoh for I have made him and his servants obstinate in order that I may perform these signs of mine among them and that you may recount to your son and grandson how I made a fool of the Egyptians and what signs I did among them, so that you may know that I am the LORD.” 

Damn.  He’s doing it, and doing it intentionally, so people can tell stories about him.  He’s doing it so we’ll be in awe of him.  In “The Good Book,” David Plotz notes this is ghastly given the cost – but dammit, we’re still telling these stories, so mission accomplished. 

But let’s flashback to Genesis for a second.  In Chapter 18, Abraham, in one of my favorite Bible moments, respectfully grilled God about Sodom and Gomorrah.  If 50 good people are there, will you spare them? Or 40? Or 20?  Or 10?  Abraham was making his case – you might be the Lord, but it’s wrong for you to kill innocents just because you have almighty power.

Well, now people are dying.  The Nile – the water supply for Egypt – turned to blood.  They lost all their cattle.  They lost most of their crops.  In a little bit, they’ll lose the rest of their crops.  And we all know what the 10^th plague is.  By the logic of Abraham’s debate with God, this is horribly, horribly wrong.  And he’s doing it just so we can tell stories?  That’s ghastly.  Where’s Moses in this anyway?  Abraham haggled with God, but you don’t see Moses or Aaron doing that here? Maybe Moses is still too timid to take on God. Abraham knew God for years before he debated Sodom and Gomorrah.  Or maybe Moses is getting a little too used to his position.  I don’t know, but the implications of how Chapter 10 starts are very troubling.

Plague #8: Locusts.  The pharaoh considers offering concessions but won’t because he fears if he lets the Israelis go, they won’t come back.  He gets off a fine sarcastic “The LORD help you” to Moses.  So on come the locusts.  Again, it’s Moses doing it.  No need for Aaron.  They eat all the crops left over from the hail – so no matter what, the people of Egypt are pretty much boned.  Widespread starvation is now a given, and likely with a higher death total than Sodom and Gomorrah ever had.  But hey – we got stories!

Pharaoh apologizes and Moses has the locusts go to the Red Sea.  NOTE: the footnotes say the ancient Hebrew really says “sea of reeds.”  Remember that one for future Red Sea references.  Naturally, though, the Pharaoh’s change of heart doesn’t take.  Specifically: 10:20: “Yet the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart.”  Oh, not enough good stories.  Maybe if he’d made us with four fingers per hand it would be enough, but we still got two more to go.

Ninth plague: darkness.  A commenter on yesterday’s entry made a nice point.  A lot of these plagues take direct aim at traditional Egyptian gods – the Nile, frogs – and now the sun.  Moses hasn’t just routed the magicians, but God is smacked specific Egyptian gods around here.  Darkness falls – on the Egyptians, but not on the Israelis.  Weird.  Pharaoh is starting to cave, but doesn’t want the Israelis to take the animals (at this point, the Egyptians need them to avoid mass starvation) but of course Moses insists on taking them.  10:27 “the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart.”  Yes, again.  The pharaoh tells Moses to go away and don’t come back – if he does pharaoh will kill him. 

Moses replies, “You are right! I will never see your face again.”  DUN-DUN-DUUUUUNNNN!!  (Well now, that little exchange didn’t go the way pharaoh hoped).

CHAPTER 11

This is a short one, but it sets up the big one, the tenth plague.  It’s like a dramatic pause just before the big climax of the movie. 

God tells Moses the plan – every firstborn son among the Egyptians will die.  There were be a wailing unlike any ever known before, but the Israelites will be fine.  And again, “the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart” to makes sure this will happen.  It’s explicitly being done so that people may know God’s wonders.

Again, let’s compare this to Genesis 18:22-32.  That’s the debate between Abraham and God on Sodom and Gomorrah.  There, Abraham got God to say the places won’t be destroyed if there are 10 worthy people.  Here? Nothing like that at all.  I guess you could argue that all the Egyptians are cruel, but we’ve seen no sign of that.  The pharaoh sucks – but even there, the only reason he hasn’t let people go is become the Lord keeps hardening his heart.  Also, the hail plague noted that some Egyptians took their cattle out, because they feared the Lord.  Heck, this chapter notes “The LORD indeed made the Egyptians well-disposed toward the people and Moses himself was very highly regarded by Pharaoh’s servants.”  Yet the LORD states every firstborn in the land will die, from pharaoh down to slave girl. 

The good news is that there is no historical evidence outside of the Bible for this ever happening, and if some of these things happened – and especially if all 10 happened in such rapid sequence – you’d think there would be some record of it in Egypt.  Some parts of the stories are easier to take if you don’t think of them as being literally true. 

CHAPTER 12

This is a longer chapter, but it’s mostly God explaining the Passover ritual to Moses.  It’s intended for the Israelites to celebrate it as written from this day forward, so there’s attention to detail paid.  Based on that, I’m taking a non-wild guess and saying this comes from the P source, the Priestly source, which normally handles this sort of stuff.  The P source is also the latest written of the three main pre-Deuteronomy sources that make up the Torah.  So you had the tradition and the rituals, and then P wrote it down and put it in God’s mouth before Passover even happened.  What was likely an event, which led to an annual ritual with the Israelis sanctifying God has the process flipped, as it begins with God saying what the ritual will be before the event happens.

At any rate, get a lamb and kill it and eat it – and put some blood by the doorstop so you’ll be passed over.  There’s a big ritual slaughtering of lambs that will go on for as long as there’s a temple in Jerusalem.  I believe the New Testament has Christ’s death around the time of the annual slaughtering of the lamb.  (Get it?  Christ dies as the lambs are slaughtered – paralleling!) Also, you’re to eat unleavened bread.  I don’t know how much ritual lamb slaughtering still goes on (not just eating lamb, but the slaughtering just before as proscribed in Exodus), but I know the unleavened bread still goes on.

Then God comes and kills all the firstborn people and animals that live in houses with the lamb’s blood outside.  Yeah, this should be worse than Sodom and Gomorrah.  True, those are entire towns while this is “only” firstborns, but Egypt is bigger than two towns. 

Somewhere around here I think we switch narrators.  The pharaoh tells the Israelis to leave – they don’t even have to ask.  He wants them gone, pronto.  But it comes so suddenly that the people “took their dough before it was leavened, in their kneading bowls unwrapped in their cloaks on their shoulders.”  So earlier the unleavened bread came from God’s pre-10^th plague decree.  Now we see the unleavened bread begin because people were in such a rush to leave.  This sounds like a more accurate depiction of how the Passover ritual began.  They rushed out with unleavened bread, it became part of the ceremony, and the P source reversed engineered things by having the Lord talk about it in advance. 

Also, we finally get a way to try to date all of this.  Verse 40 says that the Israelites have been in Egypt for 430 years.  Let’s see, by my unofficial math, Jacob (Israel himself) showed up there in 2238 (years after The Creation).  So now should be 2668.  I guess that means that Moses was born in 2588, since he was 80 when the bush burnt.  600,000 are leaving, not including children.  That’s a big gathering. 

Oh, and apparently the end of the chapter is the first time the word “Torah” shows up in the ancient Hebrew version of this.  That means law – and verse 49 says “There will be one law for the native and for the alien residing among you.”

CHAPTER 13

This stars off with a bunch of reinforcement of what God said earlier.  No leavened bread.  Enjoy the land of milk and honey.  Celebrate Passover. Oh, and consecrate every firstborn male.  That’s to commemorate the 10^th plague and the Passover. 

And they head out toward the Red Sea – which earlier the footnotes said is really “Sea of Reeds” in ancient Hebrew.  It doesn’t make the same footnote here, but will again in Chapter 15.

Moses brings Joseph’s bones with him, which is nice.  The Lord stays in front of the Hebrew, guiding them as a column of clouds by day and as a pillar of fire at night.  So there’s where that imagery first appears.

Click here for the climax to the fight versus the pharaoh.