Exodus 7

When Moses brings up his same old objections, God responds by repeating what He said before: Aaron will serve as Moses' mouthpiece, just as Moses relays God's messages to Pharaoh and the Israelites. Part of me wonders just why God chooses to depend on fallible humans to get His message across. Why doesn't God just cut out the middleman and broadcast His proclamations in a stentorian voice for all to hear? It reminds me a bit of this brilliant moment in Lilo and Stitch. Nani is humoring Lilo in this scene, but I don't think God is patronizing us just so we can feel like we've accomplished something. God loves us and undeniably wants us to love Him back. However, it's not true love if you force or tell someone to like you, so perhaps God guides us so that we may learn to love Him as well as our neighbors.

Moses and Aaron obtain an audience before Pharaoh, but it is Aaron, not Moses, who turns his staff into a snake. Maybe Moses had bad memories from what happened back in chapter 4 and has developed ophidiophobia. Even though Pharaoh's "magicians" do the same thing "by their secret arts" (verse 11), Aaron's staff cannibalizes the magician's staffs. I find Moses's choice to use the word "staff" rather than "snake" rather intriguing--and a little humorous as well. Sure, we can imagine snakes eating each other. But a staff eating another staff? It recalls Joseph's dream in Genesis 41--did the staff grow a mouth somewhere and lick its chops after cramming the other staffs down its wooden maw? I know I'm being disingenuous here; the staffs were probably still snakes when the guzzling happened, but ravenous staffs do make for quite an image.

After Pharaoh hardens his heart (not for the last time), we get the first of the infamous plagues. The Nile, the lifeblood of Egyptian livelihood and society, turns into literal blood. The fish in the Nile die, proving that they are indeed not vampire fish. Verse 21 says, "the river smelled so bad that the Egyptians could not drink its water." I would think that the very nature of blood would make the Nile not potable; its noisome nature would seem secondary. But that also meant that no one could bathe either, making for a repugnantly malodorous few days (or however long the plague lasted). But again, the Pharaoh's magicians somehow repeat this trick, though since the entire Nile had been turned to blood already, they probably only did it on a much smaller, less impressive scale. Still, Pharaoh decides to ride it out, perhaps thinking, "Well, 'The One Plague of Egypt' lacks that ineffable je ne said quoi. 'Ten Plagues of Egypt'? Much better!" As we'll see, Pharaoh will make his subjects wish that he had just let those pesky Israelites go.