The Ten Plagues

“Thus says the Lord, ‘By this you shall know that I am the Lord.’” – Exodus 7:17

To understand the ten plagues, we have to understand some things about ancient Egypt around 1250 B.C. Religion was then so much a part of life that the Egyptian language did not have a word for “religion”: it was simply their reality. The divine and natural worlds were inextricably linked; natural phenomena were considered divine forces. Life revolved around sustaining and placating gods that were involved in all aspects of nature and society. But of the over 2,000 deities in the Egyptian pantheon, one of the greatest gods was Pharaoh himself, who alone upheld ma’at, the order of the cosmos. And uphold it he did: Egypt was a world power at that time, enthroned in splendor, home to the pyramids.

The Israelites had been living for over four centuries in this totalitarian culture, an empire built on cruelty, superstition and abuse. True salvation for them was not merely being physically removed from the state of slavery: it was to incontrovertibly expose all the beauty, success, and power of Egypt for the evil and emptiness that it was. Eugene Peterson points out that otherwise, it would have been all too easy for the Israelites to repeat “the Egyptian way of success” for themselves in the promised land: “as far as they knew, this is what worked, and had worked for at least a thousand years.” They needed a freeing, a cleansing, of their imagination, of their conception of reality, so they would be able to hear and follow God. 

And so God doesn’t just kill Pharaoh outright and get the Israelites out. Over a period of eight months, he systemically destroys the natural order Pharaoh claims to keep. He rips open a curtain to reveal true reality, the reality that Yahweh alone is sovereign. As commentators have pointed out, each plague subverts various Egyptian gods: water to blood the gods of the Nile (Hapi, Apsi, Isis, Khnum), frogs the goddess of fertility who had the head of a frog (Heqet), gnats the gods of desert and dust (Set, Geb), flies the god of flies (Uatchit) and the god of creation who had the head of a fly (Khepri), death of livestock the bull gods (Hathor, Apsi, Mnevis) and the ram god (Khnum), boils the gods of health and disease (Isis, Sekhmet, Sunu), hail the goddess of the sky (Nut) and gods of grain (Min, Nepri, Anubis, Senehem), locusts the god of storms and disorder (Seth) and gods of grain. Darkness defeated Ra, the god of the sun, and finally, death of the firstborn defeated Ra’s son, Pharaoh. 

God is revealing himself as the one who alone is sovereign. In Genesis 1, God speaks (“and God said…”) ten times in creation; here again he speaks ten times through the workings of creation, so that we shall “know,” a word that appears like a thread running through the story (6:7; 7:5, 17; 8:10, 22; 9:14, 29; 10:2; 11:7; 14:4, 18). We come to know a God who does not work through prestige or power, but through, as Peterson writes, “an eighty-year-old desert shepherd and his brother, their only weapon a stick.” He uses the oppressed and despised to ultimately bring salvation, true spiritual salvation, to the world.

In Revelation chapters 8, 9, and 16, events like the plague recur in a much more cosmic and escalatory scale: hail and fire, sea becoming blood, darkness, locusts, sores, “unclean spirits like frogs.” There, we see the spiritual battle exposed for what it is. But sandwiched right in the middle of these events is a song, the song of Moses, which is also the song of Jesus, the Lamb. They sing of a God who is the true Sovereign, and this is how it ends: “All nations will come and worship you, for your righteous acts have been revealed” (Revelation 15:4). In what ways are we still captives to our culture? What spiritual strongholds do we need to ask God to be sovereign over in our lives? How can we pray for God’s sovereignty among the nations? How is God revealing himself to us?