Pharaoh Demanded a Sign and God Had Planned It Before He Was Born

When, Not If

God's instructions to Moses before the confrontation with Pharaoh contain a word that Rabbi Yehuda ben Rabbi Shalom stopped on. Exodus 7:9 does not say if Pharaoh speaks to you. It says when Pharaoh will speak to you. The future is settled. Pharaoh is going to demand a sign. He is destined to say this. The instruction to Aaron about what to do with the staff is not a contingency plan. It is a preparation for an event that has already been written into the structure of what is about to happen. The word sits in the verse like a hinge, and everything that follows turns on it. Moses is being told not what might happen in the throne room but what already stands waiting there, fixed, before he has crossed the threshold.

God had planned Pharaoh's demand before Pharaoh made it.

Even the Righteous Ask for Signs

The rabbis of Devarim Rabbah and Shemot Rabbah, compiling their teachings in the third and fourth centuries, drew from this observation a principle that ran across the whole of biblical history. Even the righteous ask for signs before they act. They documented the cases.

Noah came through the flood and asked for a sign that the waters would never return. God gave him the rainbow, bent across the wet sky where the rain had stopped. Hezekiah heard Isaiah's prophecy that he would recover and go up to the Temple in three days, and from his sickbed he asked Isaiah what sign would confirm this. Isaiah gave him the sundial shadow moving backward, the line of light retreating along the steps against its own nature. Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, facing Nebuchadnezzar's furnace, recited Psalm 115 together, one verse each, going back and forth until the psalm was fluent in their mouths, and the fluency was their sign that they could proceed. Each man received something that confirmed the instruction before he moved on it.

If this was true of Noah and Hezekiah and the three men before the furnace, then Pharaoh's demand for a sign before crediting Moses was not the behavior of a uniquely hardened man. It was normal. The difference was what he did after the sign was given.

Aaron's Staff and the Magicians

Aaron threw his staff down on the floor of the throne room before Pharaoh and it became a serpent. Pharaoh called his magicians and they threw their staffs and they also became serpents, the floor crowded now with writhing shapes where dry wood had lain. Then Aaron's serpent swallowed them all. The magicians' success lasted only until Aaron's serpent ate what they had made, and then there was one serpent where there had been many. Pharaoh's heart held firm. He had asked for a sign and received one and decided the sign did not require him to change anything.

An Object Older Than the King

The staff that Aaron used was not an ordinary tool. The tradition preserved in Shemot Rabbah gave it a history that ran back to Adam: the staff had been inscribed with the divine name, had been passed from hand to hand down through the patriarchs, had rested with Jethro in Midian, and had come to Moses at the burning bush. By the time it lay on Pharaoh's floor it had already crossed generations and borders, carried out of Eden and into Egypt, the same wood under every hand that had held it. When Moses held it on the bank of the Nile, he was holding an object that had been prepared for this moment from the beginning. The sign Pharaoh demanded had been ready long before Pharaoh was. The demand was written into Exodus 7:9 before the plagues began, and the answer to it had been carried forward through the whole line of the patriarchs to arrive, on time, in the one hand that would raise it.