The Ten Plagues #16

The ten plagues that struck Egypt form the dramatic prelude to the Exodus, a series of escalating supernatural judgments through which God compelled Pharaoh to release the enslaved Israelites while directly confronting the authority of Egypt’s gods.

Biblical Account

Moses and Aaron first came before Pharaoh with the demand, “Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Let my people go, that they may hold a feast unto me in the wilderness,” and Pharaoh answered, “Who is the LORD, that I should obey his voice to let Israel go? I know not the LORD, neither will I let Israel go” (Exodus 5:1-2). Rather than release Israel, Pharaoh increased their labor, and God answered by promising to multiply “signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 7:3). Nine plagues followed in mounting severity: the Nile and Egypt’s other waters turned to blood (Exodus 7:14-21); frogs overran the land; dust became gnats, or lice; and swarms of flies filled Egyptian houses while God spared Goshen, where Israel lived, “to the end thou mayest know that I am the LORD in the midst of the earth” (Exodus 8:22). A plague killed Egypt’s livestock while sparing Israel’s; boils broke out on people and animals; a devastating hail struck crops and cattle left in the open field, meant “that thou mayest know that there is none like me in all the earth” (Exodus 9:14); locusts consumed whatever the hail had left; and three days of thick darkness covered Egypt. After nearly every plague Pharaoh’s heart is described as hardened, whether by his own resolve or, increasingly, by God’s own action, and each promise to release Israel was broken once the plague lifted.

The tenth and final plague was announced in advance: “About midnight will I go out into the midst of Egypt: and all the firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the first born of Pharaoh that sitteth upon his throne, even unto the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the mill” (Exodus 11:4-5). Israelite households were told to sacrifice a lamb and mark their doorframes with its blood, so that when the LORD saw the blood he would “pass over” them, sparing their firstborn (Exodus 12:12-13; see The Passover). At midnight the plague struck, and “there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead” (Exodus 12:29-30). Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron that same night and finally ordered Israel to leave (Exodus 12:31-32).

Theological Significance

God told Moses that he had raised Pharaoh up “for to shew in thee my power; and that my name may be declared throughout all the earth” (Exodus 9:16), and Scripture itself says the plagues fell as judgment “against all the gods of Egypt” (Exodus 12:12). Many interpreters connect individual plagues to facets of Egyptian religion and kingship — the Nile, cattle, and sun were bound up with Egyptian worship, and Pharaoh himself was regarded as a god — though matching each plague to one particular deity is a later inference more than an explicit claim of the text; what the text itself asserts plainly is a contest for supremacy between the LORD and the whole religious and political order of Egypt.

The plagues also raise, without fully resolving, a long-debated question about divine sovereignty and human responsibility: Exodus alternates between saying Pharaoh hardened his own heart and saying the LORD hardened it. The tenth plague establishes Passover, commemorated annually in Judaism ever since and reinterpreted in Christian theology through Jesus, of whom Paul writes, “Christ our passover is sacrificed for us” (1 Corinthians 5:7), linking the plagues’ climax to later Christian understandings of atonement.