Pharaoh Heard Every Plague Coming Before It Arrived

Pharaoh did not say he did not know what was coming. He was told. Moses came to the house of Pharaoh before every plague and declared what the Lord was about to do, and Pharaoh heard the words, and the plague came anyway, and Pharaoh refused. Ten times this happened. Ten times the warning was given and refused. The Book of Jubilees frames this not as Pharaoh's irrational stubbornness but as the fulfillment of a promise God had made to Abraham before any Egyptian pharaoh had ever seen a Hebrew face.

The Jubilees passage about Moses and Pharaoh is addressed in the second person, as if the angel is speaking directly to Moses about his own mission: everything was sent through your hand, that you should declare these things before they were done, and you spoke with the king of Egypt before all his servants and before his people. And everything took place according to your words. Ten great and terrible judgments came on the land of Egypt that you might execute vengeance on it for Israel.

Vengeance. The word is specific and it points backward. The Jubilees text says: the Lord did everything for Israel's sake, and according to His covenant, which He had ordained with Abraham, that He would take vengeance on them as they had brought them by force into bondage. Abraham had been promised not only a land and descendants but also this: that the nation which would enslave those descendants would be judged. The plagues were not improvised. They were promised. They were covenantal obligations being discharged on a schedule that had been set centuries before Pharaoh was born.

The Book of Jasher's account of the ten plagues fills in the horror with extraordinary detail. Water to blood: every Egyptian who drew water found it blood in the pitcher. Every woman who kneaded dough found it blood-red in her hands. Frogs: when the Egyptians drank, the frogs were inside the water and then inside their bodies, dancing in their bellies as they danced in the river. Lice to the height of two cubits on the earth. Beasts of every kind swarming through houses from which there was no escape. A sea creature called Sulanuth, ten cubits long, rising from the Mediterranean and walking along Egyptian rooftops, reaching through walls, unlatching doors from inside so the swarms could enter. Pestilence. Boils that rotted flesh until people became putrid. Hail mixed with fire that consumed everything. Locusts of four kinds. Darkness for three days so complete that whoever was standing when it came stayed standing, and whoever was sitting stayed sitting, and a person could not lift their hand to their own mouth.

And then, the tenth. The Lord went forth in the midst of Egypt and smote all the firstborn, from the first of man to the first of beast. Pharaoh rose up in the night, and there was a great cry throughout Egypt, for there was not a house in which there was not a corpse. The likenesses of the firstborn carved in the walls of Egyptian houses fell to the floor and shattered. The bones of firstborn who had already died and been buried were unearthed by dogs and dragged into the streets. The accumulation of ten plagues arriving in sequence, each one permitted and then ended, each one explicitly predicted by Moses before Pharaoh's court, culminated in this.

The Jasher account includes a remarkable scene. Bathia, the daughter of Pharaoh who had saved Moses as an infant, went out with the king in the night to find Moses and Aaron. She said to Moses: is this the reward for the good I did you, who reared you, and now you have brought this evil upon me and my father's house? Moses told her: you are your mother's firstborn, but you will not die. No evil will reach you in the midst of Egypt.

Pharaoh himself came to Moses in the night, humbled to the point of prayer, asking only that Moses intercede for him. Moses told him: you are your mother's firstborn, but fear not. The Lord has commanded that you shall live, in order to show you His great might and His strong stretched-out arm. Pharaoh survived his own plague because his survival was also part of the covenant. He needed to see what he had refused to believe, needed to stand at the Sea of Reeds and watch the water close over his army, needed to be the one who lived to remember it.

The Jubilees framing of all this is theological in a way the Book of Jasher is not. Jasher counts the wonders. Jubilees asks what they mean. They mean that the covenant God made with Abraham at the covenant between the pieces in (Genesis 15:1), the covenant that promised bondage and then redemption, was not forgotten in the centuries between Abraham's death and Moses's birth. Every generation that labored in Egypt was laboring inside a promise that had already been made about them. And when Moses stood before Pharaoh and said, Let my people go, he was not making a new demand. He was calling in a debt that God had owed Abraham for four hundred years and was now, precisely on schedule, paying.