Pharaoh's Magicians Kept Up for Five Plagues Then the Sixth Broke Them

Lions That Did Not Bite

Pharaoh kept lions at the gates of his palace. When Moses and Aaron arrived to deliver the first demand, the lions should have stopped them at the entrance. Instead they fawned on the two brothers like dogs greeting their owners and stood aside.

Pharaoh called his magicians. At their head was Balaam, the same prophet who would later be hired to curse Israel in the wilderness. He had brought his sons Jannes and Jambres with him. Balaam heard the lions story and did not panic. "Just magicians," he said. "We can match them."

A Tie, Then a Loss

Aaron threw down his rod in the throne room and it became a serpent on the marble floor. The magicians threw down their rods and their rods became serpents too. So far, a tie. Then Aaron's serpent turned and ate the others. The magicians' rods were gone. The visual fact of that was sitting in the room with everyone, but Pharaoh chose to read the result as ambiguous and refused to release the Hebrews.

The blood came next. The Nile turned red and stank. Moses stood back for this one, because the river had saved his life as an infant and he owed it too much to strike it. Aaron stretched out his hand. The court magicians produced blood from water too, enough to confirm to Pharaoh that the effect was replicable and therefore not proof of anything uniquely powerful. Pharaoh went home to his palace and the plague ground on for seven days.

The frogs followed. Moses raised his staff over the rivers and streams and they boiled up with frogs, frogs in the houses and in the kneading bowls and in the beds. The magicians produced frogs as well, adding to the problem without solving it, which was all the confirmation Pharaoh needed. "Not yet," he said.

The Plague the Magicians Could Not Copy

The third plague was lice. Aaron stretched out his staff over the dust of the earth, and every grain of dust in Egypt became a louse, covering man and animal. The magicians stood before their equipment and tried to do the same thing. Nothing happened.

They tried again. The dust stayed dust. The lice kept multiplying but the magicians could not produce a single one. They turned to Pharaoh and said three words that the rabbis remembered as the moment the contest ended. "This is the finger of God."

They had matched blood. They had matched frogs. They could not match lice. The distinction the rabbis drew was between magic that worked with quantities, with amounts of water or numbers of creatures, and a miracle that transformed the fundamental nature of matter. You could flood a room with frogs by finding more frogs. You could not convert dust into living creatures. The lice crossed a line the magicians' arts could not follow.

The Sixth Plague and the Breaking of Their Bodies

Still Pharaoh would not release the people. The plagues continued. The wild beasts. The cattle plague. Then the sixth came: boils. Ashes from a furnace, scattered by Moses into the air, broke out in burning sores on every person and every animal in Egypt.

The magicians were covered in boils like everyone else. They could not stand before Moses. Not would not. Could not. Their bodies were destroyed from the outside in the same measure that their craft had been destroyed from the inside three plagues earlier. What the third plague had done to their professional capacity, the sixth plague did to their physical capacity. They were removed from the story at this point. They did not appear again.

Pharaoh watched them go and hardened his heart further.