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| It was a night so terrible it is still remembered today |
“Then
Moses confronted Pharaoh: 'God’s Message: “At midnight I will go
through Egypt and every firstborn child in Egypt will die, from the
firstborn of Pharaoh, who sits on his throne, to the firstborn of the
slave girl working at her hand mill. Also the firstborn of animals.
Widespread wailing will erupt all over the country, lament such as
has never been and never will be again. But against the
Israelites—man, woman, or animal—there won’t be so much as a
dog’s bark, so that you’ll know that God makes a clear
distinction between Egypt and Israel.”
“Then
all these servants of yours will go to their knees, begging me to
leave, ‘Leave! You and all the people who follow you!’ And I will
most certainly leave.'”
“Moses,
seething with anger, left Pharaoh.”
Exodus 11:4-8, The Message
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| The sound of them devouring must have been terrifying |
This
is the final confrontation between Pharaoh and Moses. For weeks Egypt
has undergone one body blow after another come from the hand of the
God of Moses known only as the Lord.
(In fact, the word translated 'plague' really means 'blow' and it is
only found, or so I am told, in Exodus.) At the beginning of the
plague narrative (Exodus 5:1), Moses had delivered the terms of
Yahweh: “Let my people go, so that they hold a festival to me in
the desert.” To wit Pharaoh, sitting ensconced on his throne in
haughty repose replies, “Who is the Lord,
that I should obey him and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord
and I will not let Israel go” (5:2). All that follows (7:14-12:30)
– the Nile turned to blood for seven straight days, the air choked
with mosquitoes and flies past counting, the outbreak of plague upon
livestock and people, the devastating rain of hail, the swarm of
locusts eating Egypt literally alive and finally the descent of a
blackness on the land of Re, the sun-god, so thick it can be felt –
all of it was God's answer to that question: He is who He is, God of
all the earth and sky, and to resist his will is futile. Ironically,
as devastating as all these “blows” have been, by the next
morning they will pale in significance of what will happen in Egypt
that night as God himself moves through the land (v. 4).
As
I have re-read this story this past month or so, a story as familiar
to me as is the story of Noah's Ark or David and Goliath, I have been
reminded that the Exodus tale per se – the one that has been
transposed into films like Cecil B. DeMille's The
Ten Commandments (1956)
and more recently The
Prince of Egypt (1988)
– is far more than a great human drama. It is a contest between the
God of Moses and the gods of Egypt and as it turns out it is no
contest whatsoever.
This is how historian and scholar Thomas Cahill puts it:
“...there
is deeper human and theological business at work in this story than
the theme of the inevitability of Pharaoh's behavior. God the Creator
has ultimate dominion over all he has created; earthly dominion is
given to men only in a subsidiary sense – only insofar as they
conform their actions to God's will. Pharaoh must fail because he is
not so conformed. The god whose representative he is, is powerless
before YHWH; he is as nothing, so much so that he never even makes an
appearance in the narrative: his residual presence is like the
faintest scent, discoverable only by an inquiry into linguistic
roots.”
“The
comedy of the narrative lies in ironic juxtaposition: Pharaoh,
supposedly all-powerful, understands nothing. It would not be too
much to say that this narrative asserts that power (because it is a
feckless attempt to usurp God's dominion) makes you stupid, blinding
you to your true situation – and absolute power makes you
absolutely stupid. The simple audience of semi-nomadic herdsmen to
whom this story was first told understood that they were wiser than
Pharaoh: they, certainly, unlike the great Ra-Moses, now with frogs
jumping all over him, now covered in horseflies, would not have
required the cumulative impact of ten plagues to change course! And
this audience would also have appreciated the paradox that they were
also more powerful than Pharaoh, because God is on the side of the
little people, the people who have no worldly power. This is a lesson
that will be repeated again and again in the story of Israel.”
“It
is precisely Pharaoh's pretense to a dominion that he does not own –
the very motivation of his actions throughout the plague narrative –
that is mocked in Exodus, that gives the narrative its satirical
edge. The lesson is so cunningly shaped as drama – ten separate
plagues, any one of which might have convinced a more ordinary mortal
to give in – that it burns itself into the memory like a brand:
when a human being arrogates to himself the role of God, he must fail
miserably.”
“The
implications of this lesson were radical in their time, since there
was no political edifice that did not claim to be founded by a god.
In one fell swoop, this subversive narrative delegitimizes all
political structures claiming a god as their author –
delegitimizes, in fact, all the political structures of the ancient
world. And Pharaoh, who claimed to know nothing of YHWH, has come to
know him all too well, 'and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there
is not a house in which there was not a dead man.'”
The
Gift of the Jews pp.
116-17
This
long excerpt makes me think of the little cult classic short from
1969, Bambi Meets Godzilla. There's
the beloved deer of our childhood memory, nibbling the grass
contentedly, without a care in the world and then – splat.
Yeah, game over.
More
recently and certainly much more satisfying to watch is this scene
from The
Avengers
when Loki, adopted brother of Thor, bids to overthrow the earth and
then encounters a force called the Hulk.
Puny god, indeed.
As
I have been studying the text and reading various commentaries on it,
I have grown increasingly annoyed by those theologians who try and
link real life phenomenon with the events of the plagues as a way to
let us know what
really happened.
You know, the guys who say the Nile turning to blood is really just a
description of a cataclysmic flooding of the mighty river of Egypt
that brings all kinds of red soil down from present-day Uganda
causing it to turn red like
blood.
This is what causes all the frogs to exit the river and when they
“croak” you have a tsunami of biological causes and effects that
taken together cripple the greatest superpower of its day. As if the
ancients, unscientific as they were, couldn't distinguish between a
river turned red because of being inundated with silt and actual,
literal blood. In my mind, their comments say more about our present
day outlook on the world, one that Professor A.J. Conyers fittingly
described in his book The
Eclipse of Heaven, than
it does on theirs.
Author and television personality Bruce Feiler makes
this point so definitively:
“When
I first started reading the Bible closely I, too, wanted – maybe
even needed – to hide behind the screen of history, topography,
science. I was interested in the setting of the story, I said. I was
interested in the historical context. I was interested in the
characters, by which I meant the patriarchs, their wives, Moses, the
Israelites. But in doing so, I was strenuously – at times
acrobatically – avoiding showing interest in the central character
of the entire book. I did this, I was coming to see, because I deeply
wanted to avoid thinking about that character, about what that
character meant to the story, and about what that character might
mean to me. But in doing so, I was shielding myself from a principal
storyline of the Bible: the relationship between humans and the
divine.”
“Not
until I reached Exodus did I finally begin to recognize the futility
of this exercise in self-delusion. As it happens, the text itself
reveals precisely what caused the ten plagues. God caused them. To
miss that point is to miss the essence of the tale, the battle
between the god of the Israelites and the gods of the Egyptians, the
battle that Eliezer Oren referred to as “My god is stronger than
your god.” Biblical storytellers clearly understood this struggle,
because the plagues expressly attack the things that Egyptians held
most sacred: the sun, the animals, the river. As the Bible says,
summing up the experience, 'The Lord executed judgment on their
gods.'” Walking the Bible: A Journey By Land Through the Five Books
of Moses, p.
183
If we miss this point, we miss the story altogether as
well as the moral: God is God and must be accorded the respect he is
due. Or else. As J.A. Motyer puts it,
All
ten of the disasters inflicted on the Egyptians were acts of God, but
the final one was outstandingly so, for in its performance the Lord
in person entered Egypt to exact a just judgment (11:4; 12:12). In
this regard the sequence of plagues illustrates the awesome biblical
truth that the final issue for recalcitrant humanity is to come face
to face with God. Divine patience and forbearance wait while every
avenue of moral probation is offered, tried and exhausted, but then
comes the point which Jesus underlined in his parable, when he said,
'Last of all, he sent his son' (Matt 21:27). The word of God cannot
be refused endlessly. There always has to be an end, a meeting with
the God whom our refusals have offered to the point of finality. The
Bible Speaks Today: Exodus, p. 126
So
reading Exodus is not just the re-reading of a good Bible yarn that
we heard first in the Sunday School of our youth. No, it's equipping
us to deal with every braggart and political leader who tries to
persuade us that contrary to the wisdom of Scripture they hold the
keys that promise to open the closed doors that bar us to a wonderful
future we have not yet realized.
