Rabbi Nathan counts the destruction with a mathematician's precision and arrives at a devastating tally. The gods of Egypt were not merely destroyed — they were destroyed four times over. And their worshippers suffered three distinct forms of divine punishment. The Mekhilta preserves his accounting in chilling detail.
The four destructions visited upon Egypt's idols: they rotted, they split, they were hewn out, and they burned. Each is a different mode of annihilation. Rotting is slow decay. Splitting is sudden fracture. Being hewn out is forcible removal — the idol torn from its base or its shrine. Burning is total consumption. Rabbi Nathan calls this "judgments upon judgments" — a doubling of the already doubled word in the Torah, suggesting that God's verdict against idolatry was not a single sentence but a cascade of escalating destructions.
The worshippers fared only slightly better — if three forms of divine punishment can be called "better" than four. They suffered plague, destruction, and smiting, as referenced in (Exodus 12:13). Plague is disease. Destruction is the collapse of everything they built and depended on. Smiting is direct, personal violence from the hand of God.
Rabbi Nathan's careful enumeration serves a theological purpose. The numbers are not random. The idols received more forms of punishment than the people who worshipped them. False gods, in Rabbi Nathan's framework, bear a greater share of guilt than those they deceived. The objects of worship are judged more harshly than the worshippers. God's fury on that night targeted the lie itself — the pretense that stone, wood, and metal could rival the Creator — even more fiercely than it targeted those who believed the lie.