THE HARDENING OF PHARAOH'S
HEART.
Exo 7:3-13.
When Moses received his commission, at the bush, words were
spoken which are now repeated with more emphasis, and which have to
be considered carefully. For probably no statement of Scripture has
excited fiercer criticism, more exultation of enemies and perplexity
of friends, than that the Lord said, "I will harden Pharaoh's heart,
and he shall not let the people go," and that in consequence of this
Divine act Pharaoh sinned and suffered. Just because the words are
startling, it is unjust to quote them without careful examination of
the context, both in the prediction and the fulfilment. When all is
weighed, compared, and harmonised, it will at last be possible to
draw a just conclusion. And although it may happen long before then,
that the objector will charge us with special pleading, yet he will
be the special pleader himself, if he seeks to hurry us, by
prejudice or passion, to give a verdict which is based upon less
than all the evidence, patiently weighed.
Let us in the first place find out how soon this dreadful process
began; when was it that God fulfilled His threat, and hardened, in
any sense whatever, the heart of Pharaoh? Did He step in at the
beginning, and render the unhappy king incapable of weighing the
remonstrances which He then performed the cruel mockery of
addressing to him? Were these as insincere and futile as if one bade
the avalanche to pause which his own act had started down the icy
slopes? Was Pharaoh as little responsible for his pursuit of Israel
as his horses were--being, like them, the blind agents of a superior
force? We do not find it so. In the fifth chapter, when a demand is
made, without any sustaining miracle, simply appealing to the
conscience of the ruler, there is no mention of any such process,
despite the insults with which Pharaoh then assails both the
messengers and Jehovah Himself, Whom he knows not. In the seventh
chapter there is clear evidence that the process is yet
unaccomplished; for, speaking of an act still future, it declares,
"I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and multiply My signs and My wonders
in the land of Egypt" (Exo 7:3). And this terrible act is not
connected with the remonstrances and warnings of God, but entirely
with the increasing pressure of the miracles.
The exact period is marked when the hand of doom closed upon the
tyrant. It is not where the Authorised Version places it. When the
magicians imitated the earlier signs of Moses, "his heart was
strong," but the original does not bear out the assertion that at
this time the Lord made it so by any judicial act of His (Exo 7:13).
That only comes with the sixth plague; and the course of events may
be traced, fairly well, by the help of the margin of the Revised
Version.
After the plague of blood "Pharaoh's heart was strong"
("hardened"), and this is distinctly ascribed to his own action,
because "he set his heart even to this" (Exo 7:22-23).
After the second plague, it was still he himself who "made his
heart heavy" (Exo 8:15).
After the third plague the magicians warned him that the very
finger of some god was upon him indeed: their rivalry, which
hitherto might have been somewhat of a palliation for his obstinacy,
was now ended; but yet "his heart was strong" (Exo 8:19).
Again, after the fourth plague he "made his heart heavy"; and it
"was heavy" after the fifth plague, (Exo 8:32, Exo 9:7).
Only thenceforward comes the judicial infatuation upon him who
has resolutely infatuated himself hitherto.
But when five warnings and penalties have spent their force in
vain, when personal agony is inflicted in the plague of boils, and
the magicians in particular cannot stand before him through their
pain, would it have been proof of virtuous contrition if he had
yielded then? If he had needed evidence, it was given to him long
before. Submission now would have meant prudence, not penitence; and
it was against prudence, not penitence, that he was hardened.
Because he had resisted evidence, experience, and even the testimony
of his own magicians, he was therefore stiffened against the
grudging and unworthy concessions which must otherwise have been
wrested from him, as a wild beast will turn and fly from fire. He
was henceforth himself to become an evidence and a portent; and so
"The Lord made strong the heart of Pharaoh, and he hearkened not
unto them" (Exo 9:12). It was an awful doom, but it is not open to
the attacks so often made upon it. It only means that for him the
last five plagues were not disciplinary, but wholly penal.
Nay, it stops short of asserting even this: they might still have
appealed to his reason; they were only not allowed to crush him by
the agency of terror. Not once is it asserted that God hardened his
heart against any nobler impulse than alarm, and desire to evade
danger and death. We see clearly this meaning in the phrase, when it
is applied to his army entering the Red Sea: "I will make strong the
hearts of the Egyptians, and they shall go in" (Exo 14:17). It
needed no greater moral turpitude to pursue the Hebrews over the
sands than on the shore, but it certainly required more hardihood.
But the unpursued departure which the good-will of Egypt refused,
their common sense was not allowed to grant. Callousness was
followed by infatuation, as even the pagans felt that whom God wills
to ruin He first drives mad.
This explanation implies that to harden Pharaoh's heart was to
inspire him, not with wickedness, but with nerve.
And as far as the original language helps us at all, it decidedly
supports this view. Three different expressions have been unhappily
rendered by the same English word, to harden; but they may be
discriminated throughout the narrative in Exodus, by the margin of
the Revised Version.
One word, which commonly appears without any marginal
explanation, is the same which is employed elsewhere about "the
cause which is too hard for" minor judges (Deu 1:17, cf. Deu
15:18, etc.). Now, this word is found (Exo 7:13) in the second
threat that "I will harden Pharaoh's heart," and in the account
which was to be given to posterity of how "Pharaoh hardened himself
to let us go" (Exo 13:15). And it is said likewise of Sihon, king of
Heshbon, that he "would not let us pass by him, for the Lord thy God
hardened his spirit and made his heart strong" (Deu 2:30). But since
it does not occur anywhere in all the narrative of what God actually
did with Pharaoh, it is only just to interpret this phrase in the
prediction by what we read elsewhere of the manner of its
fulfilment.
The second word is explained in the margin as meaning to make
strong. Already God had employed it when He said "I will make
strong his heart" (Exo 4:21), and this is the term used of the
first fulfilment of the menace, after the sixth plague (Exo 9:12).
God is not said to interfere again after the seventh, which had few
special terrors for Pharaoh himself; but from henceforth the
expression "to make strong" alternates with the phrase "to
make heavy." "Go in unto Pharaoh, for I have made heavy his
heart and the heart of his servants, that I might show these My
signs in the midst of them" (Exo 10:1).
It may be safely assumed that these two expressions cover between
them all that is asserted of the judicial action of God in
preventing a recoil of Pharaoh from his calamities. Now, the
strengthening of a heart, however punitive and disastrous when a
man's will is evil (just as the strengthening of his arm is
disastrous then), has in itself no immorality inherent. It is a
thing as often good as bad,--as when Israel and Joshua are exhorted
to "Be strong and of a good courage" (Deu 31:6-7, Deu 31:23),
and when the angel laid his hand upon Daniel and said, "Be strong,
yea, be strong" (Dan 10:19). In these passages the phrase is
identical with that which describes the process by which Pharaoh was
prevented from cowering under the tremendous blows he had provoked.
The other expression is to make heavy or dull. Thus "the eyes of
Israel were heavy with age" (Gen 48:10), and as we speak of a
weight of honour, equally with the heaviness of a dull man,
so we are twice commanded, "Make heavy (honour) thy father and thy
mother"; and the Lord declares, "I will make Myself heavy (get Me
honour) upon Pharaoh" (Deu 5:16, Exo 20:12, Exo 14:4, Exo 14:17-18).
In these latter references it will be observed that the making
"strong" the heart of Pharaoh, and the making "Myself heavy" are so
connected as almost to show a design of indicating how far is either
expression from conveying the notion of immorality, infused into a
human heart by God. For one of the two phrases which have been thus
interpreted is still applied to Pharaoh; but the other (and the more
sinister, as we should think, when thus applied) is appropriated by
God to Himself: He makes Himself heavy.
It is also a curious and significant coincidence that the same
word was used of the burdens that were made heavy when first
they claimed their freedom, which is now used of the treatment of
the heart of their oppressor (Exo 5:9).
It appears, then, that the Lord is never said to debauch
Pharaoh's heart, but only to strengthen it against prudence and to
make it dull; that the words used do not express the infusion of
evil passion, but the animation of a resolute courage, and the
overclouding of a natural discernment; and, above all, that every
one of the three words, to make hard, to make strong, and to make
heavy, is employed to express Pharaoh's own treatment of himself,
before it is applied to any work of God, as actually taking place
already.
Nevertheless, there is a solemn warning for all time, in the
assertion that what he at first chose, the vengeance of God
afterward chose for him. For indeed the same process, working more
slowly but on identical lines, is constantly seen in the hardening
effect of vicious habit. The gambler did not mean to stake all his
fortune upon one chance, when first he timidly laid down a paltry
stake; nor has he changed his mind since then as to the imprudence
of such a hazard. The drunkard, the murderer himself, is a man who
at first did evil as far as he dared, and afterwards dared to do
evil which he would once have shuddered at.
Let no man assume that prudence will always save him from ruinous
excess, if respect for righteousness cannot withhold him from those
first compliances which sap the will, destroy the restraint of
self-respect, wear away the horror of great wickedness by
familiarity with the same guilt in its lesser phases, and, above
all, forfeit the enlightenment and calmness of judgment which come
from the Holy Spirit of God, Who is the Spirit of wisdom and of
counsel, and makes men to be of quick understanding in the fear of
the Lord.
Let no man think that the fear of damnation will bring him to the
mercy-seat at last, if the burden and gloom of being "condemned
already" cannot now bend his will. "Even as they refused to have God
in their knowledge, God gave them up unto a reprobate mind" (Rom
1:28). "I gave them My statutes and showed them My judgments, which
if a man do, he shall even live in them.... I gave them statutes
that were not good, and judgments wherein they should not live" (Eze
20:11, Exo 20:25).
This is the inevitable law, the law of a confused and darkened
judgment, a heart made heavy and ears shut, a conscience seared, an
infatuated will kicking against the pricks, and heaping to itself
wrath against the day of wrath. Wilful sin is always a challenge to
God, and it is avenged by the obscuring of the lamp of God in the
soul. Now, a part of His guiding light is prudence; and it is
possible that men who will not be warned by the fear of injury to
their conscience, such as they suppose that Pharaoh suffered, may be
sobered by the danger of such derangement of their intellectual
efficiency as really befel him.
In this sense men are, at last, impelled blindly to their fate
(and this is a judicial act of God, although it comes in the course
of nature), but first they launch themselves upon the slope which
grows steeper at every downward step, until arrest is impossible.
On the other hand, every act of obedience helps to release the
will from its entanglement, and to clear the judgment which has
grown dull, anointing the eyes with eye-salve that they may see. Not
in vain is the assertion of the bondage of the sinner and the
glorious liberty of the children of God.
A second time, then, Moses presented himself before Pharaoh with
his demands; and, as he had been forewarned, he was now challenged
to give a sign in proof of his commission from a god.
And the demand was treated as reasonable; a sign was given, and a
menacing one. The peaceable rod of the shepherd, a fit symbol of the
meek man who bore it, became a serpent[10]
before the king, as Moses was to become destructive to his realm.
But when the wise men of Egypt and the enchanters were called, they
did likewise; and although a marvel was added which incontestably
declared the superior power of the Deity Whom Aaron represented, yet
their rivalry sufficed to make strong the heart of Pharaoh, and he
would not let the people go. The issue was now knit: the result
would be more signal than if the quarrel were decided at one blow,
and upon all the gods of Egypt the Lord would exercise vengeance.
What are we to think of the authentification of a religion by a
sign? Beyond doubt, Jesus recognised this aspect of His own
miracles, when He said, "If I had not done among them the works that
none other man did, they had not had sin" (Joh 15:24). And yet there
is reason in the objection that no amount of marvel ought to deflect
by one hair's breadth our judgment of right and wrong, and the true
appeal of a religion must be to our moral sense.
No miracle can prove that immoral teaching is sacred. But it can
prove that it is supernatural. And this is precisely what Scripture
always proclaims. In the New Testament, we are bidden to take heed,
because a day will come, when false prophets shall work great signs
and wonders, to deceive, if possible, even the elect (Mar 13:22). In
the Old Testament, a prophet may seduce the people to worship other
gods, by giving them a sign or a wonder which shall come to pass,
but they must surely stone him: they must believe that his sign is
only a temptation; and above whatever power enabled him to work it,
they must recognise Jehovah proving them, and know that the
supernatural has come to them in judgment, not in revelation (Deu
13:1-5).
Now, this is the true function of the miraculous. At the most, it
cannot coerce the conscience, but only challenge it to consider and
to judge.
A teacher of the purest morality may be only a human teacher
still; nor is the Christian bound to follow into the desert every
clamorous innovator, or to seek in the secret chamber every one who
whispers a private doctrine to a few. We are entitled to expect that
one who is commissioned directly from above will bear special
credentials with him; but when these are exhibited, we must still
judge whether the document they attest is forged. And this may
explain to us why the magicians were allowed for awhile to perplex
the judgment of Pharaoh whether by fraud, as we may well suppose, or
by infernal help. It was enough that Moses should set his claims
upon a level with those which Pharaoh reverenced: the king was then
bound to weigh their relative merits in other and wholly different
scales.
THE PLAGUES.
Exo 7:14.
There are many aspects in which the plagues of Egypt may be
contemplated.
We may think of them as ranging through all nature, and asserting
the mastery of the Lord alike over the river on which depended the
prosperity of the realm, over the minute pests which can make life
more wretched than larger and more conspicuous ills (the frogs of
the water, the reptiles that disgrace humanity, and the insects that
infest the air), over the bodies of animals stricken with murrain,
and those of man tortured with boils, over hail in the cloud and
blight in the crop, over the breeze that bears the locust and the
sun that grows dark at noon, and at last over the secret springs of
human life itself.
No pantheistic creed (and the Egyptian religion struck its roots
deep into pantheistic speculation) could thus completely exalt God
above nature, as a superior and controlling Power, not one with the
mighty wheels of the universe, of which the height is terrible, but,
as Ezekiel saw Him, enthroned above them in the likeness of fire,
and yet in the likeness of humanity.
No idolatrous creed, however powerful be its conception of one
god of the hills and another of the valleys, could thus represent a
single deity as wielding all the arrows of adverse fortune, able to
assail us from earth and sky and water, formidable alike in the
least things and in the greatest. And presently the demonstration is
completed, when at His bidding the tempest heaps up the sea, and at
His frown the waters return to their strength again.
And no philosophic theory condescends to bring the Ideal, the
Absolute, and the Unconditioned, into such close and intimate
connection with the frog-spawn of the ditch and the blain upon the
tortured skin.
We may, with ample warrant from Scripture, make the controversial
application still more simple and direct, and think of the plagues
as wreaking vengeance, for the worship they had usurped and the
cruelties they had sanctioned, upon all the gods of Egypt, which are
conceived of for the moment as realities, and as humbled, if not in
fact, yet in the sympathies of priest and worshipper (Exo 12:12).
Then we shall see the domain of each impostor invaded, and every
vaunted power to inflict evil or to remove it triumphantly wielded
by Him Who proves His equal mastery over all, and thus we shall find
here the justification of that still bolder personification which
says, "Worship Him, all ye gods" (Psa 97:7).
The Nile had a sacred name, and was adored as "Hapee, or Hapee
Mu, the Abyss, or the Abyss of Waters, or the Hidden," and the king
was frequently portrayed standing between two images of this god,
his throne wreathed with water-lilies. The second plague struck at
the goddess HEKT, whose head was that of a frog. The uncleanness of
the third plague deranged the whole system of Egyptian worship, with
its punctilious and elaborate purifications. In every one there is
either a presiding divinity attacked, or a blow dealt upon the
priesthood or the sacrifice, or a sphere invaded which some deity
should have protected, until the sun himself is darkened, the great
god RA, to whom their sacred city was dedicated, and whose name is
incorporated in the title of his earthly representative, the Pharaoh
or PH-RA. Then at last, after all these premonitions, the deadly
blow struck home.
Or we may think of the plagues as retributive, and then we shall
discover a wonderful suitability in them all. It was a direful omen
that the first should afflict the nation through the river, into
which, eighty years before, the Hebrew babes had been cast to die,
which now rolled bloody, and seemed to disclose its dead. It was fit
that the luxurious homes of the oppressors should become squalid as
the huts of the slaves they trampled; that their flesh should suffer
torture worse than that of the whips they used so unmercifully; that
the loss of crops and cattle should bring home to them the hardships
of the poor who toiled for their magnificence; that physical
darkness should appal them with vague terrors and undefined
apprehensions, such as ever haunt the bosom of the oppressed, whose
life is the sport of a caprice; and at last that the aged should
learn by the deathbed of the prop and pride of their declining
feebleness, and the younger feel beside the cradle of the first
blossom and fruit of love, all the agony of such bereavement as they
had wantonly inflicted on the innocent.
And since the fear of disadvantage in war had prompted the murder
of the Hebrew children, it was right that the retributive blow
should destroy first their children and then their men of war.
When we come to examine the plagues in detail, we discover that
it is no arbitrary fancy which divides them into three triplets,
leading up to the appalling tenth. Thus the first, fourth, and
seventh, each of which begins a triplet, are introduced by a command
to Moses to warn Pharaoh "in the morning" (Exo 7:15), or "early in
the morning" (Exo 8:20, Exo 9:13). The third, sixth and ninth, on
the contrary, are inflicted without any warning whatever. The story
of the third plague closes with the defeat of the magicians, the
sixth with their inability to stand before the king, and the ninth
with the final rupture, when Moses declares, "Thou shalt see my face
no more" (Exo 8:19, Exo 9:11, Exo 10:29).
The first three are plagues of loathsomeness--blood-stained
waters, frogs and lice; the next three bring actual pain and loss
with them--stinging flies, murrain which afflicts the beasts, and
boils upon all the Egyptians; and the third triplet are
"nature-plagues"--hail, locusts and darkness. It is only after the
first three plagues that the immunity of Israel is mentioned; and
after the next three, when the hail is threatened, instructions are
first given by which those Egyptians who fear Jehovah may also
obtain protection. Thus, in orderly and solemn procession, marched
the avengers of God upon the guilty land.
It has been observed, concerning the miracles of Jesus, that not
one of them was creative, and that, whenever it was possible, He
wrought by the use of material naturally provided. The waterpots
should be filled; the five barley-loaves should be sought out; the
nets should be let down for a draught; and the blind man should have
his eyes anointed, and go wash in the Pool of Siloam.
And it is easily seen that such miracles were a more natural
expression of His errand, which was to repair and purify the
existing system of things, and to remove our moral disease and
dearth, than any exercise of creative power would have been, however
it might have dazzled the spectators.
Now, the same remark applies to the miracles of Moses, to the
coming of God in judgment, as to His revelation of Himself in grace;
and therefore we need not be surprised to hear that natural
phenomena are not unknown which offer a sort of dim hint or
foreshadowing of the terrible ten plagues. Either cryptogamic
vegetation or the earth borne down from upper Africa is still seen
to redden the river, usually dark, but not so as to destroy the
fish. Frogs and vermin and stinging insects are the pest of modern
travellers. Cattle plagues make ravage there, and hideous diseases
of the skin are still as common as when the Lord promised to reward
the obedience of Israel to sanitary law by putting upon them none of
"the evil diseases of Egypt" which they knew (Deu 7:15).[11]
The locust is still dreaded. But some of the other visitations were
more direful because not only their intensity but even their
existence was almost unprecedented: hail in Egypt was only not quite
unknown; and such veiling of the sun as occurs for a few minutes
during the storms of sand in the desert ought scarcely to be quoted
as even a suggestion of the prolonged horror of the ninth plague.
Now, this accords exactly with the moral effect which was to be
produced. The rescued people were not to think of God as one who
strikes down into nature from outside, with strange and unwonted
powers, superseding utterly its familiar forces. They were to think
of Him as the Author of all; and of the common troubles of mortality
as being indeed the effects of sin, yet ever controlled and governed
by Him, let loose at His will, and capable of mounting to unimagined
heights if His restraints be removed from them. By the east wind He
brought the locusts, and removed them by the south-west wind. By a
storm He divided the sea. The common things of life are in His
hands, often for tremendous results. And this is one of the chief
lessons of the narrative for us. Let the mind range over the list of
the nine which stop short of absolute destruction, and reflect upon
the vital importance of immunities for which we are scarcely
grateful.
The purity of water is now felt to be among the foremost
necessities of life. It is one which asks nothing from us except to
refrain from polluting what comes from heaven so limpid. And yet we
are half satisfied to go on habitually inflicting on ourselves a
plague more foul and noxious than any occasional turning of our
rivers into blood. The two plagues which dealt with minute forms of
life may well remind us of the vast part which we are now aware that
the smallest organisms play in the economy of life, as the agents of
the Creator. Who gives thanks aright for the cheap blessing of the
unstained light of heaven?
But we are insensible to the every-day teaching of this
narrative: we turn our rivers into fluid poison; we spread all
around us deleterious influences, which breed by minute forms of
parasitical life the germs of cruel disease; we load the atmosphere
with fumes which slay our cattle with periodical distempers, and are
deadlier to vegetation than the hail-storm or the locust; we charge
it with carbon so dense that multitudes have forgotten that the sky
is blue, and on our Metropolis comes down at frequent intervals the
darkness of the ninth plague, and all the time we fail to see that
God, Who enacts and enforces every law of nature, does really plague
us whenever these outraged laws avenge themselves. The miraculous
use of nature in special emergencies is such as to show the Hand
which regularly wields its powers.
At the same time there is no more excuse for the rationalism
which would reduce the calamities of Egypt to a coincidence, than
for explaining away the manna which fed a nation during its
wanderings by the drug which is gathered, in scanty morsels, upon
the acacia tree. The awful severity of the judgments, the series
which they formed, their advent and removal at the menace and the
prayer of Moses, are considerations which make such a theory absurd.
The older scepticism, which supposed Moses to have taken advantage
of some epidemic, to have learned in the wilderness the fords of the
Red Sea,[12] to have
discovered water, when the caravan was perishing of thirst, by his
knowledge of the habits of wild beasts, and finally to have dazzled
the nation at Horeb with some kind of fireworks, is itself almost a
miracle in its violation of the laws of mind. The concurrence of
countless favourable accidents and strange resources of leadership
is like the chance arrangement of a printer's type to make a poem.
There is a common notion that the ten plagues followed each other
with breathless speed, and were completed within a few weeks. But
nothing in the narrative asserts or even hints this, and what we do
know is in the opposite direction. The seventh plague was wrought in
February, for the barley was in the ear and the flax in blossom (Exo
9:31); and the feast of passover was kept on the fourteenth day of
the month Abib, so that the destruction of the firstborn was in the
middle of April, and there was an interval of about two months
between the last four plagues. Now, the same interval throughout
would bring back the first plague to September or October. But the
natural discoloration of the river, mentioned above, is in the
middle of the year, when the river begins to rise; and this, it may
possibly be inferred, is the natural period at which to fix the
first plague. They would then range over a period of about nine
months. During the interval between them, the promises and
treacheries of the king excited alternate hope and rage in Israel;
the scribes of their own race (once the vassals of their tyrants,
but already estranged by their own oppression) began to take rank as
officers among the Jews, and to exhibit the rudimentary promise of
national order and government; and the growing fears of their
enemies fostered that triumphant sense of mastery, out of which
national hope and pride are born. When the time came for their
departure, it was possible to transmit orders throughout all their
tribes, and they came out of Egypt by their armies, which would have
been utterly impossible a few months before. It was with them, as it
is with every man that breathes: the delay of God's grace was itself
a grace; and the slowly ripening fruit grew mellower than if it had
been forced into a speedier maturity.
THE FIRST PLAGUE.
Exo 7:14-25.
It was perhaps when the Nile was rising, and Pharaoh was coming
to the bank, in pomp of state, to make official observation of its
progress, on which the welfare of the kingdom depended, and to do
homage before its divinity, that the messenger of another Deity
confronted him, with a formal declaration of war. It was a strange
contrast. The wicked was in great prosperity, neither was he plagued
like another man. Upon his head, if this were Menephtah, was the
golden symbol of his own divinity. Around him was an obsequious
court. And yet there was moving in his heart some unconfessed sense
of awe, when confronted once more by the aged shepherd and his
brother, who had claimed a commission from above, and had certainly
met his challenge, and made a short end of the rival snakes of his
own seers. Once he had asked "Who is Jehovah?" and had sent His
ambassadors to their tasks again with insult. But now he needs to
harden his heart, in order not to yield to their strange and
persistent demands. He remembers how they had spoken to him already,
"Thus saith the Lord, Israel is My son, My firstborn, and I have
said unto thee, Let My son go that he may serve Me; and thou hast
refused to let him go: behold, I will slay thy son, thy firstborn" (Exo
4:22, R.V.). Did this awful warning come back to him, when the worn,
solemn and inflexible face of Moses again met him? Did he divine the
connection between this ultimate penalty and what is now
announced--the turning of the pride and refreshment of Egypt into
blood? Or was it partly because each plague, however dire, seemed to
fall short of the tremendous threat, that he hoped to find the power
of Moses more limited than his warnings? "Because sentence against
an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the
sons of men is fully set in them to do evil."
And might he, at the last, be hardened to pursue the people
because, by their own showing, the keenest arrow in their quiver was
now sped? Whatever his feelings were, it is certain that the
brothers come and go, and inflict their plagues unrestrained; that
no insult or violence is attempted, and we can see the truth of the
words "I have made thee as a god unto Pharaoh."
It is in clear allusion to his vaunt, "I know not Jehovah," that
Moses and Aaron now repeat the demand for release, and say,
"Hitherto thou hast not hearkened: behold, in this thou shalt know
that I am Jehovah." What follows, when attentively read, makes it
plain that the blow falls upon "the waters that are in the river,"
and those that have been drawn from it into canals for artificial
irrigation, into reservoirs like the lakes Moeris and Mareotis, and
even into vessels for immediate use.
But we are expressly told that it was possible to obtain water by
digging wells. Therefore there is no point whatever in the cavil
that if Moses turned all the water into blood, none was left for the
operations of the magicians. But no comparison whatever existed
between their petty performances and the immense and direful work of
vengeance which rolled down a putrid mass of corrupt waters through
the land, spoiling the great stores of water by which later drought
should be relieved, destroying the fish, that important part of the
food of the nation, for which Israel afterwards lusted, and sowing
the seeds of other plagues, by the pollution of that balmy air in
which so many of our own suffering countrymen still find relief, but
which was now infected and loathsome. Even Pharaoh must have felt
that his gods might do better for him than this, and that it would
be much more to the point just then to undo his plague than to
increase it--to turn back the blood to water than contribute a few
drops more. If this was their best effort, he was already helpless
in the hand of his assailant, who, by the uplifting of his rod, and
the bold avowal in advance of responsibility for so great a
calamity, had formally defied him. But Pharaoh dared not accept the
challenge: it was effort enough for him to "set his heart" against
surrender to the portent, and he sullenly turned back into the
palace from the spot where Moses met him.
Two details remain to be observed. The seven days which were
fulfilled do not measure the interval between this plague and the
next, but the period of its infliction. And this information is not
given us concerning any other, until we come to the three days of
darkness.[13] It is
important here, because the natural discoloration lasts for three
weeks, and mythical tendencies would rather exaggerate than shorten
the term.
Again, it is contended that only with the fourth plague did
Israel begin to enjoy exemption, because then only is their immunity
recorded.[14] But it is
strange indeed to suppose that they were involved in punishments the
design of which was their relief; and in fact their exemption is
implied in the statement that the Egyptians (only) had to dig wells.
It is to be understood that large stores of water would everywhere
be laid up, because the Nile water, however delicious, carries much
sediment which must be allowed to settle down. They would not be
forced, therefore, to fall back upon the polluted common sources for
a supply.
And now let us contrast this miracle with the first of the New
Testament. One spoiled the happiness of the guilty; the other
rescued the overclouded joy of the friends of Jesus, not turning
water into blood but into wine; declaring at one stroke all the
difference between the law which worketh wrath, and the gospel of
the grace of God. The first was impressive and public, as the
revelation upon Sinai; the other appealed far more to the heart than
to the imagination, and befitted well the kingdom that was not with
observation, the King who grew up like a tender plant, and did not
strive nor cry, the redeeming influence which was at first
unobtrusive as the least of all seeds, but became a tree, and the
shelter of the fowls of heaven.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] It is true that the word means
any large reptile, as when "God created great whales"; but
doubtless our English version is correct. It was certainly a serpent
which he had recently fled from, and then taken by the tail (iv. 4).
And unless we suppose the magicians to have wrought a genuine
miracle, no other creature can be suggested, equally convenient for
their sleight of hand.
[11] To this day, amid squalid
surroundings for which nominal Christians are responsible, the
immunity of the Jewish race from such suffering is conspicuous, and
at least a remarkable coincidence.
[12] But indeed this notion is not
yet dead. "A high wind left the shallow sea so low that it became
possible to ford it. Moses eagerly accepted the suggestion, and made
the venture with success," etc.--Wellhausen, "Israel," in
Encyc. Brit.
[13] x. 22. The accurate Kalisch is
therefore wrong in speaking of "The duration of the first plague, a
statement not made with regard to any of the subsequent
inflictions."--Commentary in loco.
[14] Speaker's Commentary, i.,
p. 242; Kalisch on Exo 8:18; Kiel, i. 484.