Wholesale Animal Death & Boils - Exodus 9:1-12

9:1-7 - The 5th plague isn’t super specific, but I can see how it comes off the tail of the last one. The Lord tells M&A to go to Pharaoh and warn him that if he doesn’t let the people go, then “the hand of the Lord is upon thy cattle,” and also all the other livestock animals like horses, asses, camels, oxen, and sheep. But this would only affect the animals of the Egyptians and not the Hebrews. Maybe Pharaoh didn’t think it was that big of a deal seeing as how he could just confiscate the Hebrew’s animals, maybe he didn’t think it would be possible for this God to kill only Egyptian livestock and leave the Hebrew’s animals alone just because of the mechanism of disease and how close everyone’s animals were in proximity to each other. Pharaoh, of course, didn’t listen so the next day the Egyptian livestock start dying, but not that of the Hebrews.

As far as how this happened, let’s remember that just before this was the plague of flies, the big dog flies that attach to the soft, fleshy parts of the eyes, bellies, and “sensitive” areas of animals. These flies also lay their eggs in these area and chew, leave excrement, so it’s easy to see how infection can become significant. I’m not saying that the cattle were killed in this manner, but it makes for a pretty compelling argument that this might have been the way in which the diseases spread that had such a catastrophic affect on the animals.

When the reports started coming in that the Egyptian livestock were in fact dying, Pharaoh had to do his own investigation, so he sent out his own people and they found that ‘there was not one of the cattle of the Israelites dead.” This must have been a miracle as well, not only taking the lives of the Egyptian animals, but preserving the lives of the Hebrew animals. Just from the sheer number of livestock that there would have been in Goshen at that time, assuming and normal birth and death rate, there must have been at least one animal that should have died in that time frame among the Hebrews, even if just from old age, or birthing or sickness of another kind or bowel obstruction or something. There was definitely a two way miracle here, not just death but also survival. Pharaoh was pissed when he heard that Egyptian animals were dying, but not Hebrew animals, “and the heart of Pharaoh was hardened, and he did not let the people go.”

9:8-12 - For the 6th plague, we are back to the end of a second set of plagues, which means that there was no warning for Pharaoh again this time. Remember that God might have been separating M&A from the Pharaoh’s association of the plagues to show not only Pharaoh but all the Egyptian and Hebrew people that He was the God of the whole world, He didn’t need M&A to do His work. God tells M&A something interesting now, not to hit anything with a stick, but a more subtle movement, to take “handfuls of ashes of the furnace, and let Moses sprinkle it toward the heaven in the sight of Pharaoh.”

Imagining the sight of this, I wonder what would be going through Pharaoh’s mind watching this. He usually has specific warnings about what is coming, and the only time that he didn’t it was lice, which was miserable but not fatal so maybe he didn’t think it would be that bad. I think, as someone who has worked in medicine for a long time, taking ash, dust, whatever out of the “furnace” anything could have been in that. Ash is a key component of lye which is caustic and destructive, there’s all types of disease that can survive among ash, animals could have gone through there and left all types of excrement which when dried becomes the hanta virus, etc. When I hear someone took a powder of some sort and sprinkled it in the air causing people to get sick, I immediately think or anthrax, but TB suggests something like small pox, and likens the mechanism of disease to something along the lines of biological warfare or mustard gas or something like that.

Right after covid started, I got coxsackie virus, which is hand, foot, mouth and it was horrible. It was like strep throat times a thousand, I think it was the sickest I’ve ever been in my life. There was the 104 degree fevers for a week, the fatigue, all that, but guess what the worst part was, the boils. They were all through my mouth, lips, nose, and throat. They were so bad that even drinking water felt like swallowing shared of broken glass, it was so bad I lost 12 pounds in 2 weeks just from not eating and my brother who I got it from lost 25 pounds in 2 weeks. I couldn’t imagine having the strain where I would have had these open sores (boils) all over my body. This is where I think the severity and seriousness of these interactions between God and Pharaoh takes a pivotal turn. Before God’s presence and requests were irritating but manageable, but after this, it was serious business.

Again, like with the livestock, this plague of boils only affected the Egyptians, not the Hebrews. And again, the magicians were there watching all this go down, and not only could they not stop the plague with the own powers, they surely couldn’t replicate it, but they “could not stand before Moses because of the boils; for the boil was upon the magicians, and upon all the Egyptians.”