Va'eira (Part 4) - Exodus 6:2-9:35

The Plagues

This week, the first 7 of the 10 plagues are listed. I thought that it would be fun to list them, and any quirks that are typically missed.

It should be noted that most of the plagues don't say how long they lasted, and the few that give some hint about it give a rather short time. Most don't need God to stop them. They just sort of end.

So put aside all of the movie and Haggadah versions that you might have seen and read and just look at the oddities that are the plagues of Egypt.

Water into blood (דָם): Verses 7:14–24

The Rashi on 7:15 is quite funny. It tweaks "he goes out [to] the water" to "the water goes out of him", in order to have God tell Moses "do this magic trick while Pharaoh is taking a piss in the Nile".

But verse 19 should be paid close attention to. It is YHVH giving Moses specific instructions to give to Aaron: "take the staff and stretch out your hand" and yet, as Moses always does, he improvises, and instead he has Aaron hit the water with his staff! 

In the Book of Numbers, when God tells Moses that He and his brother have sinned and cannot enter the Promised Land, the assumption is that it was because God told Moses to talk to the rock, and instead he hit the rock. Nowhere does that text tell us the reason, and those who suggest that it is because of not following God's orders exactly, haven't paid attention to all of the other orders.

The final part of the curse, verse 25, tells us that the plague of killing all the fish (yet the frogs and the wild animals survive) and making the water undrinkable lasted only a week. Rashi, always the apologist, in order to stretch it out says that while the plague lasted a week, Moses was giving warnings for 3 weeks. 

It lasted a week. And Pharaoh didn't have to give in (his own magicians showed how easy of a trick it was to do), and Moses didn't have to ask God to stop. It was just one of those "one week only" plagues.

Frogs (צְּפַרְדֵּעַ): Verses 7:25–8:15

Again, YHVH gives Moses a new command, telling him to tell Pharaoh to let the Hebrews go worship him. Please note that it is not a request to have them leave forever, but to go and have a group worship service for a few days. That's a bit deceptive for a God, who also refused to tell Pharaoh Himself.

And, again, God gives a specific command, "put out your hand with the staff", but instead, Aaron simply stretched out his hand, with no staff mentioned.

And yes, the verse starts out with "frog" in the singular (8:2), which is the source of many legends.

Even though his magicians showed him how to do that magic trick, Pharaoh was fed up with all of the frogs and told Moses to entreat YHVH to get rid of the damn frogs.

Moses then says a weird phrase, "Boast about me!" (8:5). He wants Pharaoh to give a specific time to prove that there are none like YHVH, who is the Elohim of the Hebrews. Pharaoh agrees, and all the frogs die and rot everywhere, and the rest remain in the river.

It should be noted that up to this point, it does not say that YHVH hardened Pharaoh's heart, but that he hardened his own heart (an expression of stubbornness). Yes, YHVH said that he would do it, and in verse, 7:13, before the plagues, He did it so that Pharaoh wouldn't listen to Moses (which makes the act of sending Moses rather fruitless). And sometimes He is involved, and sometimes He is not. 

Lice (כִּנִּים): Verses 8:16–19

This is actually head lice. God: "Stretch out your staff". Aaron: Stretches out his hand and his staff.

It says that in verse 13, "all of the dust of the land [of Egypt] became head lice". It should be noted that the Jewish sages learned from this that head lice can spontaneously generate, and that they do not come from eggs.

These must have been special head lice because they also infested the stabled animals (a behemah is typically a domesticated farm animal). The magicians couldn't copy that trick and proclaimed that it was "the finger of Elohim"! This is typically translated as "finger of God", but as polytheistic magicians, they most likely were speaking of their God or Gods.

And this was another one of those plagues with no specific time indicated that just stopped on its own. Pharaoh wasn't impressed.

Wild Animals (ערוב): Verses 8:20-32

We typically translate arov as "wild animals", but it really means a swarm, a mixture of critters. Some interpret this to mean things like scorpions and spiders and the like. Some Christian commentators have them as flying things, like flies. But for some reason, the Passover Haggadah will typically illustrate this with lions and tigers attacking the Egyptians.

So "Wild Animals" is based on tradition, not on the grammar. And they stayed out of the Land of Goshen, where the Children of Israel lived.

Verse 8:18 is fascinating, "I YHVH am in the midst of the land [of Egypt]". This anthropomorphism bothered both the Targumist and Saadiah HaGoan change "in the midst" to "rule/ruler in the midst" as if to say, "I live in the heavens, but My authority is even here". But the simple reading is that YHVH is dwelling in Egypt.

The interaction between Moses and Pharaoh at the end, where Pharaoh says, "Go worship your God in the land [of Egypt]", and Moses refuses, and gives a bizarre reason, saying that if they slaughter an offering to YHVH, the citizens of the land will stone the Hebrews.

What, neither the Pharaoh or YHVH cannot keep them safe?

Diseased livestock (דֶּבֶר): Verses 9:1–7

Here was have the warning that a plague will wipe out all of their livestock. It also mentioned camels, which weren't a domesticated animal 3,500 years ago in Egypt. That wouldn't take place for another 500 years.

So Moses says, "This will happen tomorrow", and all of the animals died. It seems to indicate that all of this took place in one day.

When Pharaoh saw that the Hebrews animals weren't affected, he decided that he wasn't going to do them any favors.

Boils (שְׁחִין): Verses 9:8–12

With this plague, the Pharaoh isn't even given a warning. And Moses and Aaron were told to put soot into their cupped hands and that the two of them were to toss it to shamayim before Pharaoh. Verse 10 tells us that only Moses did it.

The Targumist has a problem with tossing this stuff to shamayim (another word for the firmament, also called "heavens"), so he changes to to "towards the sky".

The Ramban wrote that this dust that fit into the hands of Moses caused the boils seems bizarre, since his hands weren't that big to affect all of Egypt!

Also, this plague just stopped. Pharaoh wasn't spoken to by Moses

Hail (בָּרָד): Verses 9:13–35

God: "Stretch out your hand to shamayim". Moses: stretches out his staff. The Targumist doesn't like the image of the staff stretching to shamayim, so he changed it to "toward shamayim".

The description of the hail is one of supernaturalism: it was fire and ice combined, and the center of each giant ball of hail was flashing fire.

So apparently God can do anything.

Verse 28 "Entreat YHVH, it has been much, this qolot of Elohim".

The word "qol" (קול), means a voice or a sound. Here, it is in the plural, as in the "sounds or voices of Elohim". This is often rendered as "Godly thunder", but a better translation would be the "noisy outbursts of Elohim". It should be noted that "thunder" (ra'am, רעם), is used everywhere else in the Tanach except here, where the translations would have you believe that we are talking about "thunder".

Conclusion

Some of the plagues happened without talking to Pharaoh. Sometimes YHVH hardened Pharaoh's heart, and sometimes Pharaoh did it himself. The time that each plague took is mostly unknown, and how long this entire process took is also unknown. Even some words that are generally interpreted one way, don't really have that meaning at all.

In short, the Passover story can pretty much be whatever you want it to be!