Ten times Pharaoh promised to free the Hebrews. Ten times he broke his word. Each broken promise brought something worse than the last, and according to Josephus, the plagues that struck Egypt were unlike anything any nation had ever experienced.
It began with the Nile. God turned the river to blood—not symbolically, but so completely that the Egyptians had no water to drink anywhere. Those desperate enough to try suffered terrible pain. Yet the same river ran sweet and clean for the Hebrews. Pharaoh relented. The plague stopped. Pharaoh changed his mind.
Then came the frogs. They swarmed out of the river, invaded every house, crawled into beds, contaminated food and water, and filled the land with a nauseating stench as they died in heaps. Pharaoh begged Moses to take the Hebrews and leave. The frogs vanished. Pharaoh forgot his promise instantly.
Lice erupted from the bodies of the Egyptians themselves—impossible to wash off, impossible to treat. Then came pestilential creatures of species no one had ever seen before, killing both the animals and the farmers who tended them. Then boils, breaking open with infected sores while the flesh beneath was already decaying. Then hail larger than anything Egypt had ever known, smashing fruit-laden branches to the ground. Then locusts, devouring every seed the hail had spared.
Each plague followed the same devastating rhythm: Pharaoh would negotiate, offering partial freedom—go, but leave your wives; go, but leave your children; go, but leave your cattle. Each concession was a trap, and each trap provoked God to escalate further.
Then came darkness. Not ordinary night but a suffocating blackness so thick it obstructed breathing. Egyptians died in terror, believing the darkness itself would swallow them. Three days and three nights it lasted.
When even this did not move Pharaoh, God commanded the Hebrews to prepare the korban (a sacrificial offering) Pesach (קרבן פסח), the Passover sacrifice, on the fourteenth of the month of Nisan. They marked their doorposts with blood and ate the roasted lamb. That night, the firstborn of Egypt died. Pharaoh's own neighbors came to the palace demanding he let the Hebrews go. He finally called for Moses and told them to leave—and the Egyptians loaded them down with gifts, desperate to see them gone.