The Wind Up - Exodus 7:14

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 thing dies down. So this is a long process.

Second is that there are only 9 “strikes” which is the more accurate translation for the Hebrew word that we used to mean “plagues.” There are three sets of set “strikes” against Pharaoh and the people living in Egypt “all progressive in nature,” and the pattern is such that in each set, M&A warn Pharaoh about the first two, but the third one in each of these sets, happened unannounced. TB suggests that this pattern was to take the focus off of M&A and their roles in everything that was happening and put it squarely on the shoulders of Yehoveh. He comments, “Plagues 1&2, then 4&5, then 7&8 occurred with advance notice to the king od Egypt. Plagues 3,6, and 9 happened with NO prior notice to Pharaoh. To Pharaoh and his brain trust it appeared that Aaron and Moses were responsible for this series of calamities… just as the King’s magicians were given credit for their own sorcery. Yet, it was hard to pin plagues 3.6 and 9 on Moses and Aaron, since they were not present before Pharaoh to tell him what was about to happen. God used the 3rd of each series of 3 plagues to show Pharaoh and his cronies that Yehoveh was the author of these things, not His Mediator or His prophet. And, that Yahweh, God of Israel, was supreme over all things, everywhere including Egypt.”

Third, is that the first 9 plagues were all things that had occurred naturally within Egypt from time to time, that the Egyptian people were at least somewhat familiar with. I’ve seen so many articles where people are trying to “dispute” the plagues and just say things like ‘”it wasn’t blood, it was red algae,” and things like that. The point is that these are not disputed theories, they are widely accepted among Bible scholars to be the most likely scenarios. There’s no rule that says that just because God uses the nature that HE created to show His power, that makes it any less significant. TB notes that there is a “God-pattern of using nature in extraordinary ways.” These events might have occurred organically in nature, but the part where God showed His power is that it occurred at Moses’ command, when it was not in the natural cycle to do so, and to an extent even greater than occurs regularly. And this makes sense because a God of all things surely can do things that are unnatural, but it would be even more powerful to show that this God controlled the very nature that surrounded them and that they worshipped through other illegitimate gods.