We don’t like the ten plagues in Exodus, they feel like exactly the sort of thing we secretly wish wasn’t in the Old Testament because they afflict our innate sense of fairness and our unexpressed desire for God to be kind to everyone—even those who hate and afflict his people.
Our affections there are out of step with the Bible, I fear, for all we shouldn’t be flippant when discussing the issues. There’s lots to unpack, but I’d like to explore a particular side-alley which we probably miss when reading because we tend to pivot to apologetic questions.
The plagues are a tight literary unit, that is trying to express the mastery of Yahweh over the world and over the powers.
The first thing to note is that the plagues are in a pattern of 3 + 3 + 3 + 1. For the purposes of this blog post I’m going to look at the first nine, as the narrative has the last stand firmly on its own. Hopefully the last—what we now call the Passover—being separate is clear in the amount of time the text takes to describe it and the way the story unfolds. It takes two chapters for a start. The other nine follow an approximate pattern where each contains some sort of threat, plague, and interaction with Pharaoh, though not all in the same way.
How do we know they’re in a pattern of 3 + 3 + 3?
In plagues 3, 6, and 9, no request or threat is made to Pharaoh before the plague happens, instead God just tells Moses to go about causing the plague to fall. This literary feature leads us to think of them bracketed in three sets.
Then we might notice that the first three plagues fall on all the people in Egypt, Hebrew and Egyptians alike, but plagues 4-9 avoid the land of Goshen where the Hebrews live. The tenth plague distinguishes too, but in a different way.
Then we might notice a form of escalation among them, the first three being unpleasant, the next three producing hardship, and the final three the utter desolation of Egypt such that there was nothing left. To zoom in on the last three, notice how the hail destroys much of Egypt’s plant life, the locusts seem to destroy all of it—though presumably the wheat harvest would still come up later—and the darkness seems to decreate the nation, returning them to formless and void. Sin’s eventual result is decreation, much like Noah’s flood, Egypt is being unmade. Then the final judgement is death in the tenth plague.
We could bring in a little knowledge of Egyptian religion and see that each plague is a deliberate action of Yahweh against one of Egypt’s gods, culminating in a plague of darkness to demonstrate mastery over Ra, god of the sun. We might then notice that the tenth plague strikes at Pharaoh’s own divine line by striking his heir.
At the very least you would want to suggest that Yahweh is demonstrating he is more powerful than what the Egyptians worship, their conversion to true religion under Joseph seems to have long ended. I’d like to go further because the Bible usually wants us to assume that the gods of the nations are real, even if they aren’t all that the nations believe of them. Whatever we call these spiritual powers—and demons is as good a name as any—the Lord demonstrates defeat of them. As is always the way when Yahweh fights the gods, there’s not any combat, the actions of the Lord simply show them to be impotent before him.
The first three plagues fit in a pattern of water, earth, and sky (nile → frogs → gnats), which is the biblical layering of the cosmos (waters below, earth, heavens above). We are meant to read and notice not just Yahweh’s conquering of foreign gods but his mastery of the whole world. Leithart thinks this pattern continues, in the second set there’s a clear connection with the livestock to the land and the boils to the air (soot is thrown in the air to cause them), the connection of the flies to water is the mention of Pharoah being spoken to in the water.
The third set has similar connections: locusts to the earth and darkness to the sky are reasonable, connecting hail to the water is a little more of a stretch. Of course, hail is water, but it also falls from the sky. It’s not a connection we’d notice without the earlier ones, but that doesn’t invalidate the pattern. I’m halfway convinced. If that’s right there’s a deliberate repetition in the escalation that the Lord is God of the whole cosmos, and then even over death.
There are many more things that we say about the plagues, and even more about what we learn of the human heart from Pharaoh’s reactions (which are concerningly relatable), but just spotting the pattern is a good first step.
This is a carefully layered narrative that’s supposed to teach us in all of its particulars. It teaches us of the power of the true God above all the powers and over the natural world, he is worthy of our praise.
Photo by Csaba Talaber on Unsplash
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