The Plagues Made Egypt Confess Against Itself

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The Frog That Whistled

The marble floors of Egypt split open from underneath to let the frogs through. Not the doors, not the drains. The polished stone in the good houses and the tiled floors in the better ones cracked apart and they came up through the cracks, and as they came they announced themselves out loud. We are the messengers of the one who spoke and the world was.

Rabbi Akiva said there had been one frog to begin with. It bred until it filled the whole land of Egypt.

Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah cut him off. Akiva, what are you doing with stories. Go back to leprosy and corpse impurity, that is your work. There was one frog, yes, and it whistled to the others and they came.

Either way, one soft wet animal walked through stone that a chisel would have argued with. God has a habit of handing the hard thing to the soft one. Hornets cracked the boulder rolled across a cave mouth. A shepherd's pebble sank into the front of a giant's skull, a stray arrow found the seam in a king's armour, and fig roots break open bare rock every spring.

The Magicians Kept Their Hands in Their Robes

Pharaoh's magicians had one move and they made it every time. Whatever Moses and Aaron brought, they matched. A staff into a snake, blood in the river, frogs out of the water, the old gesture, hand into the fold of the robe and out again with the trick in it.

Every plague they matched cost them something. They pulled their hands out of their robes white as snow, leprous to the wrist, and it never healed. It got worse with each new imitation and stayed with them to the day they died.

By the boils they could not stand upright in front of Moses at all. They stood in his presence covered in sores from the same hands they had used to prove there was nothing special about him.

The Mark on the Wall

Moses walked up to the wall of the palace and scratched a single line on it with something sharp.

Tomorrow, he said, when the sun comes to here, I bring the hail down on you.

Pharaoh spent a day watching a scratch on his own wall. And before it fell there was a warning, which is not how war works. A man who means to kill his enemy comes at him without notice. This one sent word ahead. Send now and get your livestock under cover, get your slaves in off the field, the hail is coming and whatever is out in the open dies.

It came down cutting. Some say it fell spinning and sheared the trees off at the trunk. Some say it came like a hammer. Nothing like it had ever landed on Egypt. The barley went flat, the flax went flat, and the wheat and the spelt stood up through all of it untouched, because wonders were done for them.

Standing in that wreckage Pharaoh did the thing no Egyptian had done through six plagues. He confessed. The Lord is in the right, he said. I and my people are the wicked ones.

He was paid for it. When the sea came down on his army, the earth opened and took the bodies in, and they got a burial. That was the wage for one honest sentence spoken too late.

The Week Egypt Sat Still in the Dark

The Egyptians deserve to be struck with darkness, God said to the ministering angels, and every one of them agreed at once.

What came was more than the order. A king tells his officer to give a slave fifty lashes and the officer gives a hundred. The dark that arrived over Egypt was thick as a coin, thick enough to lean on. Some say it was scraped off the darkness above the sky. Some say it came up out of Gehinnom, the same black the wicked are covered with down there, the same black that was on the face of the deep before anything was made.

For three days a man could still move in it. For the next three he could not. Whoever was sitting when it came stayed sitting for three days. Whoever was on his feet stayed on his feet.

Israel had light in their houses that whole week, and they used it. They walked into Egyptian bedrooms and storerooms while the owners sat frozen in the dark, and they looked, and they memorised. Later, when the word came to go and ask the neighbours for their silver, an Israelite would knock and hear I have nothing, and answer: it is in the chest in the back room, on the second shelf, I saw it in your hand. And the Egyptian handed it over.

The Firstborn Went to Pharaoh

Then the firstborn sons of Egypt did the arithmetic.

Everything the Hebrew has said would happen has happened, they told their fathers. He says every firstborn in Egypt dies. Go and let these people out. One man here has ten sons and they will all die like the rest of us. Do not leave us standing here for the sake of a work gang.

Their fathers refused. So the firstborn went up to the palace, because Pharaoh was himself a firstborn, the one firstborn in the country with a reason to care. Get up, they said. Send them out.

Go out and break their legs, Pharaoh told his guards. My life or theirs, and you come in here arguing for the Hebrews.

The firstborn went out of that room and turned against their own fathers with whatever was to hand. Six hundred thousand men of Egypt died that day at the hands of their own sons, in their own houses, before the night of the tenth plague had begun. Egypt finished itself off first.

Split by a Hair

No living thing can stand on the exact middle of a night. Moses said about midnight, because a man cannot find it. The one who made the hours walked into that night and split it down the centre by a hair, and struck. Not through an angel. Not through a messenger.

Every firstborn in Egypt went, including the ones abroad, and the firstborn of Ham and Cush and Put and Lud. Pharaoh was left standing among the corpses of everyone born first. His daughter Batya was a firstborn too, and she lived, because Moses prayed for the woman who pulled him out of the water.

Egyptians buried their dead inside their own houses. That week the dogs came in through the burial niches and dragged the bodies out into the rooms in front of the families.

Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, they had said, years earlier, in a council chamber. So God put shrewdness into the water. At the sea it did not simply drown them. It thought about it first.