Egypt was on her knees when Moses returned to Pharaoh and pleaded again. However, he hardened his heart and sent them away.
8-9. Plague of locusts and darkness
Moses warned that a
swarm of locusts would come so Pharaoh’s counselors advised him to give in. The
will of the nation was buckling. Pharaoh was probably insulated by his power,
his palace and his servants. The people bore the brunt of his intransigence.
He then tried to
bargain with Moses, offering to let some go, just the men and probably just the
men with Moses in a narrow, selective interpretation of “let us go”.
As it happened, the
entire exchange was laced with cynicism, as in “sure you can go, but who goes
with you?” Then, with biting sarcasm and a feigned reverence for God, he
retracted. With all the miracles going on, we can easily miss how Moses
survived all of that.
So a strong East wind
blew for 24 hours and brought a terrible storm of locusts, as Egypt had never
before witnessed. Locust storms are common to Egypt, but not like that.
Pharaoh repented and pleaded for respite. His feigned reverence, cynically
reducing God to another god in the pantheon, in this case the God of Moses. However, it also confirmed that all the other gods were contrived by Pharaoh.
Yet God sent a strong
west wind to drive the swarm to the Red sea. There is some counter-cynicism in that.
Watching the air traffic go left and right before a bemused Pharaoh seems like
something out of a comedy.
Pharaoh just dug
in again so a great darkness fell. It wasn’t an eclipse, they are never of three day duration, but
Santorini did block out the sun with its mighty discharge.
The end of the line
Pharaoh relented and
told them they could go, but Moses insisted on taking all the fuel
needed for sacrifice, and all their livestock. It was too much for Pharaoh. He
cautioned them never to reenter his presence, to which Moses said, “you will
never see me again”.
He then spoke to “the
press” on the steps of the palace or in the courtyard. Whatever, he did not
speak again to Pharaoh when he warned of the last plague and its imminence.
That night, the angel of death would stalk the land and kill all the firstborn
sons of Egypt.
9. The final plague, the death of Egypt’s
firstborn
He urgently instructed the Jews to slaughter a lamb and to use hyssop to paint the door posts of every
Jewish home, to protect them from the slayer.
That night, the great
avenging angel went through the land like a wraith and spared no one, except
those with bloodied door posts, which he passed over, hence the name “Passover”
was ascribed to the memorial of that great moment of deliverance.
God had cowed Pharaoh
and humbled him, judged his gods, shaken his throne, upended his presumed
divinity and supposed virility, but the last judgment would hit him well
below the belt. The loss of an heir was the greatest offence imaginable.
It finally exposed his mortality and brought the props of
paganism crashing to the floor. He stood in the debris, broken, naked and confused. He was finally just reduced to a mere man.
The death of the firstborn recompensed Egypt for the slaughter of Jewish children decades
earlier. The princess who spared him may well have become queen and, if so, she
had also had no children, which may account for her interest in Moses.
As such, she was probably
the last monarch of the 12th Pharaonic dynasty, Queen Sobeknefure. A
new dynastic line started after her. The disproportionate hostility to Moses
for killing a slave-driver may have had less to do with justice than rivalry for the throne.
The 13th
dynasty extended beyond the Exodus, but through the brother of Neferhotep I,
not through his son. His tomb was never found. It seems that Pharaoh's brokenness was more about the egotistic battle to have a son at all, but it was also his only son.
A new day dawned for Egypt and their 430 years
of slavery ended
That day and month was
marked as the new beginning: the first day of the first month of the first year.
That was 1 Nisan (1st of the month Nisan, in our April).
However, whilst the Passover
was forever memorialized by the Jews, a different day was selected for their
New Year or Rosh Hashana, namely 1 Tishrei, in September.
The prescriptions of the
Passover meal were very clear. It had to be a 1 year old male lamb,
unblemished, which had to be cooked whole with its blood sprinkled on the door
posts. Nothing was to remain and what was left in the morning had to be burnt.
It is an obvious
allusion to substitution, in which a firstborn male lamb substituted for the
firstborn of each Jewish household. That pointed to an event in the distant
future, on the same feast day, when God’s only son became our Passover lamb.
They were told to eat
with haste, with their shoes on and staffs in their hands, in readiness for
their departure in the morning. That
feast also informed the weekly Sabbath meal, just as the breaking of bread was
instituted the night before Jesus died. That too washed feet.
The solemn procession
that snaked out of Egypt the next day, was headed by a man who had grown into a
towering stature and had, as such, eclipsed Pharaoh. Once again, the Jews had
brought reform to that land, the way they have always informed human progress.
Such was the tribute
of the Egyptians, that they blessed the departing slaves with offerings of gold,
silver and other gifts.
Truly, it was one of the
greatest human events of history. Over 600,000 men on foot left with their
wives, children and livestock: an Exodus of about 2 million souls.
God insisted that the
story be retold to their children and to their children’s children, forever, as
a perpetual memorial to the astonishing events of that time. Glory to God.
(c) Peter Missing @ Bethelstone.com
(Image) from themagicschoolbus.blogspot.com
(Image) from themagicschoolbus.blogspot.com
