Today, I am reading and commenting on  Exodus 7-9.

I first noticed that Aaron’s staff swallowed up the staffs of Pharaoh’s advisers when they were all snakes when I watched the animated movie, “The Prince of Egypt”.  In the movie, Pharaoh does not notice this, but I believe the passage intends for us to understand that Pharaoh was aware of it happening yet chose to refuse God’s command anyway.  Pharaoh’s advisers were able to reproduce the signs which Moses and Aaron performed up until they produced gnats.  At which point, Pharaoh’s advisers warned him that he was going up against God (or, at least, against a god).   I want to note that even though God told Moses before he performed his first sign for Pharaoh that He would harden Pharaoh’s heart, the passage describes Pharaoh’s refusal to let the Israelites go in a manner which suggests Pharaoh making a choice until the sixth plague, the plague of boils.  The Egyptian people believed that the Pharaoh was a god, or perhaps better phrased as they believed he was the incarnation of a god. Thinking about that makes me wonder if this Pharaoh believed that he was a god and that his advisers were duplicating the signs Moses and Aaron performed using his power.  Or, did he know that his advisers were performing tricks and assume that the signs performed by Moses and Aaron which his advisers could not reproduce were also tricks which his advisers did not know the secret to perform?  In any case, Pharaoh had all of the evidence he needed from when the staffs turned into snakes to know that he should listen to what Moses and Aaron had to say.  Of course, I write that as if there is no way I would have made that mistake.  And I know that there is a good chance I would have made the same mistake.  How many times have we failed to listen when God was speaking to us?

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.