Blogging Through the Book of Mormon

8:16- -32 This third plague in the first set can be seen as a severe natural consequence of the river having an abnormal “red tide” situation, but what’s interesting is that Pharaoh isn’t warned about this one like he was the other two. God tells Moses to tell Aaron to “stretch out thy rod, and smite the dust of the land, that it may become lice throughout all the land of Egypt.” Lice is brutal, but TB notes that the Hebrew word used here could also be used to signify gnats or “no-see-ems” as they say in the south, which are little teeny flying bugs that can get through your clothes and bite your skin. These aren’t usually fatal, but I bet if they are bad enough then you’ll wish they were. I remember when we were in Iraq there was an infestation of the Middle Eastern equivalent of chiggers, and the bites were crazy, it looked like I had small pox because of how dense the bite marks are, and the itching, oh my goodness the itching. Anyway, all this is to say that it might not kill peopl...

8:1-15 – Even though the water turning to “blood” (probably a red tide situation), was surely distressing, it wasn’t enough for Pharaoh to comply with God’s request. God tells M&A to go back to Pharaoh and demand a release of the Hebrews “and it thou refuse to let them go, behold, I will smite all thy borders with frogs.” This doesn’t seem to be that serious of a threat to me, but who knows, maybe it was worse anciently. TB asks and answers, “Why frogs? Well, a frog was the animal symbol of fertility in Egypt; and Hecket was the frog/fertility goddess. So, here we have a further assault on the Egyptian false religion.” He also notes that frogs coming out of the Nile river was a naturally occurring event, but it usually happened in the October/November time of year with the frogs only coming a few feet out of the river and staying in the swampy marsh. The I also points out that the imbalance of the Nile’s water composition (red tide or algae or whatever it was) might have driven the...

7:15-25 - It’s finally time for the show to begin and as God instructs Moses on what to do, I wonder if Moses knew that it was going to take this long and this many events to convince Pharaoh, or did he think with each iteration, “ok surely this is going to be the one that convinces him?” God tells Moses to go stand by the river bank in the morning to see Pharaoh, which must have been a predictable routine for Pharaoh, and state, “The Lord God of the Hebrews hath sent me unto thee, saying, Let my people go, that they may serve me in the wilderness: and, behold, hitherto thou wouldest not hear.” At that point, Moses is to “smite” the water of the river with the staff, “and they shall be turned into blood.” Not only will the water from the river be turned into “blood” but that will spread to any and all water throughout Egypt including any that had already been gathered, but also the fish in the river will die and the water would stink. And this is what happened, M&A went to Pharao...

7:14 - The sticks turning into snakes and eating the magician’s sticks were unconvincing to Pharaoh and he further hardened his heart, refusing to let the people of Israel go. There’s a few points that TB made that I wanted to bring up before moving on to the plagues in general, first of which is the timeline. Unlike in all the movies, where everything moved pretty quickly, TB notes that Bible scholars all agree that the timeline from the first encounter until the people are released in anywhere from 8-12 months, with the general consensus being around 10 months. This means that these events took time, and more significantly it wasn’t a constant barrage of misfortune, death, and disease and Pharaoh standing in his palace, arms crossed saying, “no way!” There was time for the event to happen, the crisis to subside and be cleaned up, and then Pharaoh would say no. There are even several times when he relents and agrees to let Israel go, but then changes his mind once the distressing thin...

7:1-13 - After the disastrous encounter M&A had with Pharaoh, Moses is devastated and turns to God for, I don’t know maybe instruction, chastisement, encouragement, at this point it’s basically a “what happened?!” kind of conversation. God again lays out the plan, that Moses is playing the role of God here because he is the one directing Aaron on what to say to Pharaoh, and assures him that ultimately Pharaoh will not just allow the Hebrews to leave Egypt, but will demand that they go. God again points out that Pharaoh’s heart will be hardened, either by God or by himself maybe both, and that that God will “multiple my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt.” I think something important to remember here is that this show of force is not necessarily for Pharaoh’s benefit, but for the Hebrew people. Yes, all these miracles will eventually convince Pharaoh to comply, but the main purpose is to convince the Hebrew people that this God, their God, is the most powerful of all time a...

6:1-30 - It’s obvious that Moses is distressed about how this whole situation has gone down, he feels guilty and incredibly inadequate and he just doesn’t understand why Pharaoh didn’t just let the people go like God said that he would. God answers him basically saying, “It’s all part of the plan.” This is honestly exactly what I would have needed to hear. Interestingly, when reassuring Moses that this is all going according to plan, he notes that he is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, “but my name JEHOVAH was I not known to them.” This goes back to TB’s point of the importance of knowing a god’s name in order to have power and control over that god as was believed anciently. TB suggests that this is God’s way of revealing Himself little by little to the people until the ultimate culmination of Jesus Christ coming, saying, “The next to the last revealed manifestation of God that we read about in the Bible, is Yeshua. And, Jesus made the relationship between God and man almost as p...

5:6-23 - Immediately after declining M&A's proposal to "let my people go," Pharaoh doubled down telling the taskmasters of the people, "Ye shall no more give the people straw to make brick, as heretofore: let them go and gather straw for themselves." It's important to note here that Pharaoh did NOT decrease their daily brick quota, so now not only do they have to make the same number of bricks as before, but now they have to gather a large portion of the buildling materials themselves as well. TB notes that this is an example of a leader totally screwing himself by being stubborn and cruel, noting that because the Hebrews had to now spend so much of their time finding and procuring the straw, they couldn't make hardly any bricks, grinding Egyptian constuction to a halt. Of course the solution to this decrease in end product wasn't to re-evaluate his position, but instead to increase the violence against the workers and it quickly became a "b...

5:1-5 - After talking with the Hebrew leadership, Moses and Aaron were probably thrilled that the people accepted their words and seemed on board with the mission. The next step was to go to Pharaoh and get him to free the people, so they go and tell him, “Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Let my people go, that they may hold a feast unto me in the wilderness.” TB did an interesting thing when reading through this chapter for his class and he used a version of scripture that used the name YHWH for each instance of the word “God” or “Lord” here and it’s used MANY times in this chapter specifically. The purpose of this is to set the stage for how the ancient world would have really understood this interaction. We have to remember that anciently people believed in many gods who ruled only over a small territory and that knowing anything about these gods personally, such as their name, gave the humans power over the gods. In fact, in the case of Egypt specifically, Pharaoh was considered...

4:27-31 – The circumcision incident seems like it is thrown into the soup of timeline without any real explanation as far as when it actually happened, at what point in the journey. Interestingly, we now kind of circle back in the timeline and see that God is not only working with Moses to get him ready, but working with Aaron to get him ready as well. The interesting thing with Aaron though is that the process he would have needed to go through to get ready would have spanned probably years, meaning that even if he didn’t know exactly why he was being prepared, or he might not have even known that it was a preparation, God knew that Aaron would need to be ready. So with all the hemming and hawing that Moses did and how outraged God seemed that Moses wouldn’t just trust Him enough to do it, God knew that Moses ultimately would need his brother and began the work preparing Aaron long before Moses even had the opportunity to accept or decline. Thus we see that God is all knowing and wor...

4:24-26 - There’s a strange and interesting incident that happens kind of out of the blue while Moses is traveling with his wife and two sons from Midian to Egypt. The JST has the incident as being the God was angry with Moses and appeared to him “and his hand was about to fall upon him, to kill him; for he had not circumcised his son.” The timing is interesting because this wasn’t a baby boy, I believe that he was quite a bit older, but why wait until Moses was traveling for God to bring the issue up? Maybe it was because back in Midian Moses was in his wife’s domain with her family, under her influence, I don’t know. And why was God ready to kill Moses after he had just sent him on a journey to free millions of Hebrews? I’m not exactly sure of the answers, but the questions it raises is interesting. Both the IM and TB note that “the Tradition of the early Israelite sages is that Moses knew full well he was to circumcise his son, but Tzipporah wouldn’t let him. It was the man’s, the ...

4:22-23 - Another point that the Lord wants Moses to make to Pharaoh is that “Israel is my son, even my firstborn… Let my son go, that he may serve me: and if thou refuse to let him go, I will lay thy son, even thy firstborn.” This isn’t touched on in the IM very much, but TB notes that “the firstborn, always speaking of the MALE firstborn, was considered a child of special significance. Pharaoh would most certainly have understood what Moses was saying to him.” God was indicating that the Hebrew people were special to Him as a group, not just one individual guy, but everyone and that He had a responsibility to care for and train the Hebrew people to be who He wanted them to be. There are two other points that TB brings up, the second one isn’t so much for Pharaoh, but more for us, and that is that if Israel is the firstborn, “being labeled the firstborn, indicated that there is to be a second-born… and perhaps a 3rd, 4th, 5th, and more.” This is significant to us because we can see t...