Exodus - Lesson 9

Dr. Carmen Imes 
Exodus 
OT605-09 
Signs and Wonders
Lesson Transcript

So we have come to the signs and wonders. I already hinted in an earlier session that I think we're not quite right when we call these the 10 plagues. The Bible never counts them.

It never says there were 10. And so as I came to this part of my commentary work, I tried to come with an open mind and see where are the places where Yahweh is showing who he is to Pharaoh, and not just where does he bring a plague on someone. And I am now convinced that there are 12 and that the Bible consistently calls them signs and wonders.

There is a plague in the middle of the signs and wonders, but there's only one that uses that word plague. So I am going to, as consistently as I can, refer to them as the signs and wonders. But first, before I show you what I've seen here, I want to consider two proposals that are often made about the signs and wonders

One is that each one attacks a particular god of Egypt. That, for example, the Nile turning to blood would be an attack on the Egyptian god Osiris, whose bloodstream is the Nile. And so it's almost like overturning Egyptian thought and mocking Egyptian ideas by making it come true.

I think that this doesn't quite work. And the reason why it doesn't quite work is that there are multiple plagues or signs that seem to be attacking the same Egyptian god if we tried that on for size. And then there are lots of Egyptian gods that are completely untouched by the plagues.

So I have a volume in my office on the gods and goddesses of ancient Egypt, and there are whole categories of deities in Egypt that the plagues have nothing to do with. So it doesn't seem to me to be a systematic dismantling of the Egyptian pantheon. However, it does seem to be that the signs and wonders disrupt the very important Egyptian concept of ma'at.

And ma'at is a word we'll talk about again in a moment, but it's a concept of truth, balance, order, harmony. And it's something that Pharaoh himself was charged to protect. He was supposed to maintain ma'at in his realm.

It might be somewhat corresponding to the Hebrew word shalom, which is not just the absence of conflict, but a kind of peace where all is right in the world. So yes, this does seem to be disrupting Egyptian ma'at, but I don't think it's taking aim at one god after the other. The other proposal that's often raised in relation to these signs and wonders is that there might be a natural chain reaction.

So Greta Hort published an article, I think back in the 1940s, suggesting that each plague kicked off, the first plague kicked off a chain reaction that then brought the other one. So for example, the Nile, when it turned to blood, it decreased the oxygen level in the water. She thinks there was a proliferation of bacteria that were reddish that turned the water red.

And so that made the fish die. And because of the lack of oxygen, it forced the frogs to come up on land. So the second plague is resulting directly from the first one.

And then the frogs died and were in heaps, and gnats multiplied on their dead carcasses. So that's where you get the plague of gnats. And then the gnats carried disease, anthrax, and that later caused the death of the cattle.

So she tries to show a natural chain reaction between the plagues. This doesn't quite work for all of the plagues. You can kind of find, like maybe the first six or so could be related to each other, but then hail and locusts have nothing to do with it, darkness and the death of the firstborn.

So it seems like it's only a partial solution to kind of explaining why this order. It also doesn't acknowledge the text claim that each plague miraculously started and stopped at Moses' command. So even if you could say this was a natural chain reaction, you have to account for Moses being able to say, I'm going to make it stop tomorrow or make it start tomorrow.

And that was clearly miraculous. I don't think that Greta Hort's intention was to discount the historicity of the plagues. In fact, it's those who believe in the historicity who are most likely to talk about a natural chain reaction, because they think these things actually happened and they want to understand why.

But it does seem like it has an anti-supernatural bent to it. And I just don't think it's necessary. So what we're going to focus on instead is the literary patterning in these, between these signs and wonders.

And then in the next session, we'll talk about what's actually going on theologically and sociologically with each one. But first let's consider why these happen the way they do. There's a couple of key texts that introduce to us these signs and wonders.

And the first is Exodus 7 verses 8 to 13. This is the first confrontation with Pharaoh where the staff turns into a snake. Yahweh anticipates how Pharaoh is going to respond.

So Yahweh spoke to Moses and Aaron saying, when Pharaoh speaks to you saying, give a wonder to prove yourselves, then you shall say to Aaron, take your staff and throw it before Pharaoh and it will become a sea serpent. We'll talk about that later, that translation later. But notice that Pharaoh is actually asking for a sign, give a wonder.

So you might wonder why did God bring these devastating plagues or signs and wonders on Egypt? Well, Pharaoh asked for it, explicitly says, prove it to me, prove that you have power. And so as the signs and wonders unfold, they show us that God really did have superior power to Pharaoh. In Exodus 9 verses 15 and 16, this is in the middle of the plague of hail and there's already been a plague on livestock at the beginning of chapter 9, where the livestock who were in the fields died.

And God says to Pharaoh, before the hail comes, he says, by now I could have stretched out my hand and struck you and your people with the plague. So here again, using the word plague that was used for what happened to the livestock, so that you would vanish from the land. Indeed, for this purpose, I've raised you up for the of showing you my strength so that my name will be recounted throughout the land.

This is a fascinating statement because God is indicating to Pharaoh, you haven't seen everything I could do yet. You might've thought I was pulling out all the stops, but I haven't yet. It actually reminds me of that scene in the movie, Princess Bride, where there's a sword fight going on between two of the characters at the top of a cliff.

So we have the dread pirate Roberts and we have Inigo Montoya and they're having a left-handed sword fight and they're ranging all over the terrain and they're doing flips and they're both very good at sword fighting with their left hand. But halfway through their fight, one of them says, there's something I haven't told you. And the other one says, oh, there's something I haven't told you.

It turns out they're both right-handed and they've both been sword fighting with their left hand just to make things a little more interesting and to give the other person a fair shot at it. And when they switch to their right hands, then you can see how incredibly powerful they are. And here in the middle of the sign of hail, God is saying to Pharaoh, you think that you are enough for me or that you're a match for me, but there's something I haven't told you.

I have been sending you signs and wonders left-handed and you could see the full strength of my hand. I could have sent a plague against your people. I took out your livestock as a warning, but now you're forcing me to take this up a notch or up to the next level.

And we've already seen what God said in Exodus 4 verses 22 to 23, where God tells Moses, thus you will say to Pharaoh, thus says Yahweh, Israel is my son, my firstborn. So I say to you, send my son away so he may serve me, but you refuse to let him go. Therefore, I myself will execute your son, your firstborn.

Each of these passages give us a clue of the logic behind the signs and wonders. The punishment will fit the crime, but not immediately. God doesn't march Moses into Egypt and immediately kill the firstborn.

He's going to unfold the signs and wonders little by little from completely harmless to annoying to a little bit inconvenient and it's going to get, when Pharaoh consistently refuses to respond, God's going to increase the intensity until finally he gets to the death of the firstborn. Sometimes people struggle with how could a good God bring so much destruction on a whole nation and I think if we slow down and watch the way God does it, we see a God of incredible patience and incredible mercy who's giving the Egyptians chance after chance to respond to him before they experience the ultimate devastation. Many commentators have noticed that there's literary patterning going on in the signs and wonders and as with other parts of Exodus, this is one place where people spend a lot of time talking about source criticism where they say, oh, this plague is by J, the J source and this plague is the D source and this plague is the E source and here they're combined.

I have not found any of these explanations persuasive or convincing. In fact, chopping it up into its bits seems to me to disintegrate the beautiful tapestry that we have in the book of Exodus and so along with other commentators, I'm noticing, oh, there's this fascinating patterning in the signs and wonders. So these are the traditional 10 plagues that I have here on this chart and you'll notice that they fall into cycles of three and many commentators have noted this, that the first sign has a forewarning and it happens in the morning and Moses is told to station himself and confront Pharaoh and that same sequence happens in again in the fourth plague and in the seventh plague but then the second of each cycle, there's a forewarning but we're not told when it happens and Moses is just told go to Pharaoh.

In the third plague of each cycle, there's no forewarning, no timing is mentioned and there's no command about where to meet Pharaoh, it just happens. So this series of three, three, three, three plus the tenth is a really interesting thing to notice. I asked myself, is this all? Is it just these three elements that we could track and see these cycles play out or is there more than that? So I printed out all of the plague narratives, I cut them into their constituent parts, I pushed them all out across my desk and I started with highlighters and sticky notes trying to find what I could find in these plagues and I was absolutely floored by how many elements are shared by these different cycles.

So here is my more complex chart of the elements that I discovered as I laid them all out. Eventually I taped them to the back of my office door in a grid pattern so that I could keep going back and checking and finding more things. So we have the traditional ten plagues in the dark square, one through ten, and then I've added the prologue, what I'm going to call the prologue and the climax, to make a total of twelve signs and wonders.

And in cycle one, there's shared elements that go across but then in column A there's shared elements that go up and down. So the up and down columns match what I just showed you in the previous chart where there's a forewarning, where there's a forewarning and it happens in the morning, but there is so much more. In each of the first of each cycle, Moses tells Pharaoh to send away the people.

Each time he explains that the reason for this sign is so you may know that I am Yahweh. Each of these is going to have an extent of the whole land of Egypt that's affected. Each of these includes both Moses and Aaron and in each of these first ones Pharaoh has a heavy heart at the end.

So that's the first of each, the first of each cycle. In the second of each cycle we have the shared elements of the forewarning, the send my people away. Each time it happens tomorrow, there's something about tomorrow that comes in.

Each time we're told Pharaoh refuses to listen and each time it ends with a heavy heart. And in the third of each cycle we have no forewarning, it affects both human and animal. Pharaoh, we're told Pharaoh did not listen and we're told his heart was firm.

So there's a clear pattern this direction, but then we have also patterning horizontally. So in cycle one, all three of the first traditional plagues plus the prologue involve the magicians of Pharaoh. They involve a staff.

In each one, Moses is supposed is supposed to say to Aaron what to do. In each one there's stretch out your hand and do this. Each time Pharaoh did not listen and we're told it happened just as Yahweh said.

So those are all shared elements for those first four signs and wonders. In cycle two, we have a repeat of the first, the elements of the first cycle. So there's not a lot of new elements except for one thing.

There's a distinction between Egypt and Israel. So in four, five, and six, God brings the sign against Egypt, but he does not bring it against the Hebrews. So he's beginning to make a distinction between them.

And then in cycle three, we have a new crop of elements and we have this incredible intensity to each of these signs. So instead of just a short account, the accounts get much longer, like triple the length for the hail and the locusts and the darkness and death. Each time they're told to stretch out their hand, each time the sign is unprecedented, nothing like this has happened before.

Each one is said to affect the whole land of Egypt and each one Pharaoh's heart was firm. And then we have the final climactic sign, what I'm calling the last of the twelve signs and wonders, and that's the drowning of Pharaoh's army. And that drowning of Pharaoh's army includes elements from all three columns and all three rows.

It's like the crescendo. I live 20 minutes from Disneyland and if I'm paying attention, I can hear the fireworks in the evening. Sometimes I miss it, but often I'll be sitting there reading a book and I start to hear the pop, pop, pop, pop in the background.

And I can always tell if it's the grand finale because it's pop, pop, pop, pop. And then all of a sudden the grand finale is like so many things going on at once and just kind of over-the-top sound. And that's what we get with the climax at the Sea of Reeds.

The drowning of Pharaoh's army is all kinds of elements that have been brought together. There's no forewarning. Moses stretches out his hand.

He takes his stand by the sea and it's so that you will know that I am Yahweh. Pharaoh has a firm heart and God displays his mighty hand. This is too many elements to be just a coincidence.

To me this is a clear literary patterning. The narrator wants us to see this is not just God being fickle or random. He's unfolding a planned program incrementally and he's gradually increasing the intensity until Pharaoh experiences the ultimate fate.

The death of his firstborn and then the death of his entire army. So remembering back to chapter one where Pharaoh was nervous about how many Hebrews there were and he wanted to drown the baby boys, we then come to the end of the signs and wonders and all of the warrior men of Egypt are drowned. And it seems like the ultimate punishment that fits the crime of the first Pharaoh in Exodus.

So some of you are already wondering about the heart of Pharaoh and why there's heavy heart and firm heart and really the operative question is how could a good God harden someone's heart and then punish them for having a hard heart? And so we are going to spend a whole session just on that question because it's such an important one. But for now I want to show you one more layer of patterning that I think supports and reinforces this. So here we have three cycles of three plus the climax and the prologue on either end.

Notice what happens Umberto Casuto noticed another kind of pattern where the plagues come in pairs. So he noticed what you see here in the in the center box that the first two plagues have to do with the Nile River, the blood and the frogs. The second two plagues have to do with insects, the lice or gnats and swarm of some kind of insects.

The third pair has to do with bodily harm. So there's the plague on livestock and then the boils on human and animal. The next pair has to do with harming the crops.

The hail and the locusts both impact the crops and then the last two has to do with darkness. We have the darkness, three days of darkness and the death of the firstborn which is the ultimate darkness and it happens at night. So we have darkness for the last two and that to me seemed really compelling and so then I asked myself but what about the fact that there's 12 not just 10 and I then I noticed oh but the first the first sign where Moses' staff swallows the staff of Pharaoh is actually prefiguring the final climactic sign where the sea swallows the army of Egypt.

So in both cases God shows his superiority to Pharaoh's authority by swallowing the symbol of Pharaoh's authority. First his snake as a warning and then his entire army. So it seems to me those are wonderful bookends for what Cassudo noticed as pairs and I think it's possible to see both of these patterns operating at the same time.

Again it's very sophisticated literature presenting to us what happened historically. Terence Fredheim is someone who has really shown a light on the way that the plagues are an uncreation that the way that they undo creation. So these signs and wonders bring chaos in place of order.

If you think about think back to Genesis 1 and what you know about Genesis 1 where God is bringing order to creation. He's separating light and dark. He's separating sky and water and he's separating sea and dry land and and then he's populating each of those domains with their proper residence.

In the signs and wonders those boundaries get erased. Darkness comes in during the day. Things that are supposed to live in the water come up on land.

Things that are supposed to stay in the wild come into their homes. Insects coming into homes and instead of the flourishing of creation and the growth of fruitful seed-bearing plants we have destruction of seed-bearing plants and the destruction of fruit trees and of animals. So all the good things that come in creation in Genesis 1 get diminished or dismantled in the signs and wonders.

This I think is similar to what we see with the flood narrative in Genesis where God pushes the giant reset button and brings the water back over everything to destroy in judgment what he had first created to be good and so here in Egypt God is doing this in a localized fashion where he's saying if you pharaoh are going to rule over creation rule over other humans in a way that oppresses them rather than provide space for flourishing then I am going to destroy the order and destroy the goodness of your society. I'm going to mess it up until you pay attention to me and so I think Fred Heim is right that there's uncreation going on. The signs and wonders are also more than just a moment of judgment.

Each one of them points forward to a disastrous future. So each one is kind of a warning. So first Moses' staff swallows the Egyptian staffs and then the Egyptians are swallowed by the sea as I mentioned before.

First the water of the Nile turns to blood and then the Egyptian armies are killed in the sea. The frogs cover the land and then the sea covers the Egyptians. The dead frogs pile up and the dead Egyptians pile up on the seashore.

Each one of these first things is like foreshadowing you know this is just a minor thing it could get a lot worse and it does. Not one fly remained at the end of the the swarm that comes into Egypt and at the end of the sea incident not one Egyptian remained. The locusts were driven into the sea and then the Egyptians were driven into the sea using the same word.

So I'm really grateful to Fred Heim for his careful work noticing the repeated words and showing how each of these points forward to that ultimate climax of the death of the army of Pharaoh in the sea. The narrator also uses these signs and wonders to invite us to compare Yahweh's treatment of the Egyptians and the Israelites. So for example when the water turns to blood they couldn't drink the water and if you fast forward to chapter 15 when the Israelites are in the wilderness and they couldn't drink the water he performs a miracle to make bitter water sweet so they can drink it again.

So instead of giving them water they couldn't drink he makes it so they can drink the water. In Egypt he rains hail and in the wilderness he rains bread for the people to provide for them. In Egypt the locusts come up and cover the land and in the wilderness quail comes up and covers the land providing meat for the Israelites to eat as they're traveling through the wilderness.

So again there's a contrast and a distinction being made between the people that God is bringing judgment on and the people God is providing for. These signs and wonders are also a warning to the Israelites and this reinforces what we talked about in the first session about how God is not playing favorites here. It's not that he only loves the Hebrews and he hates all the other nations.

He actually warns the Israelites that this will happen to them if they don't obey. In Deuteronomy 28 verses 58 to 60 he says if you do not carefully follow all the words of this law which are written in this book and do not revere this glorious and awesome name Yahweh your God, Yahweh will send fearful plagues on you and on your descendants harsh and prolonged disasters and severe and lingering illnesses and in case you haven't made the connection yet he makes it explicit. He will bring on you all the diseases of Egypt that you dreaded and they will cling to you.

So this is a stern warning that you don't have a free pass to go out and do whatever you want. If you're going to be the people of God you need to live in a way that's obedient to God's law otherwise what happened to Egypt could happen to you too and of course we see some of that happen. I'm thinking of the book of Joel that describes the locust plague that comes because the people of Israel have not been faithful to the covenant.

So this is a kind of an entry a wide-angle lens on the signs and wonders. We're going to zoom in next and see individually how they worked but before we do that do you have any questions? So you mentioned that part of the signs and wonders was the undoing of creation. Would you say that sometimes what we term as God's wrath is him trying to do things to restore what's been lost in creation at different points? Yes, I do.

Sometimes people will struggle with the plagues as being so judgmental or full of wrath and I want to say okay if you were being enslaved by the Egyptians would you not want God to put a stop to it? I think sometimes we read the Bible from our comfortable western middle class setting and we just think really did he have to be so harsh when actually if we lived in Rwanda and we had just been through a genocide we would read this very differently. We would see Yahweh is the kind of God who takes sin seriously and puts a stop to injustice and I don't think we want a God who just turns a blind eye to injustice. I think we want one who is going to fight for those who cannot fight for themselves and that's what I see here.

But at the same time that he's uncreating Egypt he's bringing out a new creation which is the Israelites. So we'll talk about this later but when he splits the sea they walk through on dry ground and it's the same word for dry ground that we have in Genesis 1 when God separates the sea from the dry ground. It's a work of new creation so he's simultaneously uncreating bringing chaos and bringing into a place of flourishing his people which is so beautiful.