Pharaoh Was on God's Schedule from the First Insult

Most people read the plagues as ten loud thunderclaps from heaven. Shemot Rabbah, the midrashic commentary on Exodus compiled in the land of Israel between roughly the tenth and twelfth centuries, reads them as a calendar. Pharaoh is not improvising. He is keeping appointments he doesn't know he has.

The sneer that started the clock

The first appointment is verbal. Moses and Aaron walk into the throne room and ask for three days in the wilderness. Pharaoh fires back, lama. Why are you disturbing the people from their work. Go to your burdens.

The rabbis in Shemot Rabbah 5:16 stop on that one word. They reread lama as lema. What. As in, what are you, and what are these matters of yours. Pharaoh isn't asking a question. He is sneering. He is telling two old Hebrew men that their God and their mission are too small to interrupt a workday.

Then he twists the knife. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi notes that the tribe of Levi, Moses and Aaron's tribe, was never put on the brick crews. So Pharaoh adds, you two have free time, that's why you've invented a god to sacrifice to. Go back to your burdens. The accusation is that liberation is a luxury hobby for the unenslaved.

The swarms come to Pharaoh's house first

The clock keeps ticking. By the time the fourth plague lands, the order of arrival is no accident. Shemot Rabbah 11:3 reads (Exodus 8:20) carefully. The swarms come into the house of Pharaoh first, then into the houses of his servants, then over all the land. Why that order. Because Pharaoh gave the wicked counsel first. (Exodus 1:22), the decree to throw every Hebrew son into the Nile, came from his mouth. So the beasts arrive at his door before anyone else's.

Rabbi Yehuda says the swarms were lions, leopards, bears. The Egyptians used to force Israelite slaves to capture wild animals for sport. So God sent the animals back, uncaged, on their own initiative. Rabbi Nehemya argues for hornets and mosquitoes. Shemot Rabbah sides with Yehuda for a strange, exact reason. When the swarms left, (Exodus 8:27) says not one remained. Hornets could have been left to rot. Lion hides and bear pelts are valuable. God made sure the Egyptians couldn't even profit from the corpses of what had eaten their children.

Negotiating with a man who is already losing

Pharaoh tries to bargain. Sacrifice to your God, he tells Moses, but do it here, in Egypt. Moses refuses. The animals we slaughter, he says, are the very animals you Egyptians bow down to. If we kill them in front of you, your own people will stone us before sundown.

The midrash catches Moses being shrewd here. He says the Israelites need a three-day journey into the wilderness, and Shemot Rabbah adds, quietly, in order to mislead them. Moses is buying distance. He knows what's coming and he doesn't want Pharaoh's army close enough to chase before the people are out of reach.

Pharaoh agrees. Then breaks his word. The swarms leave because Moses prayed for them to leave, not one specimen left behind, and Pharaoh stiffens his neck again. The clock keeps ticking.

Not one hoof stays behind

By the ninth plague, Pharaoh is gasping. He offers a last compromise. Take your people, just leave the livestock. Moses answers in a line Shemot Rabbah 18:1 turns into a manifesto. Not a hoof shall remain. Even an Egyptian-owned animal, if a single hoof of it ever passed to Israelite ownership, stays with us. And, Moses adds, we don't even know what God will demand once we get there. Maybe sacrifices equal to two hundred and ten years of slavery. You, Pharaoh, are flesh and blood. We are leaving with a blank check.

Pharaoh explodes. Get out of my face. Do not see my face again. Moses replies, you spoke well. I will not see your face again.

And here Shemot Rabbah does something audacious. It pictures God hurrying into Pharaoh's palace, an idolatrous building Moses had refused to even speak inside, just so Moses's last word to Pharaoh would not become a lie. God arrives to deliver the final warning Himself. One more plague, He tells Moses. Then you go.

About midnight

Moses comes out of the palace and announces the deadline in public. About midnight, the Lord will go out in the midst of Egypt. He doesn't say at midnight. He says about midnight. The rabbis notice the hedge. Moses is leaving room for human error, in case the astronomers in Pharaoh's court calculate a slightly different hour and use the gap to call him a liar.

God doesn't leave the room. Rabbi Abahu reads (Isaiah 44:26), He fulfills the word of His servant, and identifies the servant as Moses. The plague strikes precisely at midnight, exactly when Moses said it would. Not five minutes early. Not five minutes late. The whole machinery, the sneer in chapter five, the swarms arriving at Pharaoh's address in chapter eight, the not-a-hoof in chapter ten, was running on the same clock.

And one more layer. The midrash says God had already consulted Abraham about this midnight, generations earlier. When Abraham chased the four kings and (Genesis 14:15) says he divided the night against them, the rabbis read it as God and Abraham splitting the night between them. Abraham took one half then. God took the other half on Passover, two centuries later. Pharaoh thought he was negotiating with two shepherds. He was negotiating with a covenant older than his dynasty.

The last image

Shemot Rabbah leaves you with a picture worth carrying. A king on a throne, screaming at two old men to get out of his sight, not realizing he is the one who has been on the clock from the moment he first asked, what are you. The answer was always going to arrive about midnight.