And Moses and Aaron did all these wonders before Pharaoh: and the LORD hardened Pharaoh's heart, so that he would not let the children of Israel go out of his land.
Moses and Aaron did all these wonders before Pharaoh. In the narrative of the ten plagues, what is remarkable is, not only their character as natural occurrences special to the country, though brought on in a form and with a regularly increasing intensity evidently supernatural, but the consecutive order of their occurrence. Both these features, particularly the latter, exhibit the punitive hand of God stretched out in judicial infliction as clearly as any events have ever demonstrated the agency of a Providential Ruler. The series commencing with the Nile, which, as the chief material source of Egypt's fertility, was held in so high estimation that its waters were reckoned sacred-the pollution of their favourite river, struck the people with astonishment and horror. The destruction of the fish in the river generated a breed of vermin; and the pestilential effluvia arising from the putrefying carcasses of the frogs produced a great increase of other vermin, which was soon followed by a destructive murrain among the cattle, and a loathsome cutaneous disease on the bodies of the people. In the subsequent plagues of the hail, the locusts, and the darkness, though the physical cause is not so distinctly traceable, their characteristics also were founded on the state of the country and the climate.
The occurrence of these plagues singly was well fitted to arrest attention. But viewed as a whole, they must have produced a profound sensation among intelligent and reflecting observers, who could not fail to see the God of the Hebrews asserting his supremacy by these marvelous phenomena over the entire course of nature within the range of Egypt. Nay, not only so; but by employing, as His means of chastisement, scourges which, in a lighter form and a more limited degree, are of frequent occurrence in Egypt, Yahweh not only gave striking proofs of His supreme power, but demonstrated that these natural events also proceeded from Him as not temporarily only, but permanently Divine Ruler in Egypt, as in all the world.
Rationalists, who maintain the unchangeableness of natural laws, and deny that the Almighty interfered to inflict these plagues, ascribe what is miraculous in them to the traditional embellishments of a later age (Davidson's 'Introduction,' 1:, p. 103). But to all who accept the historic truth of this narrative, the miraculous character of these plagues appears clear and unmistakeable. The intensity, the extent, the orderly succession of these plagues, their occurrence and their cessation at the command of Moses, and the marked exemption of the district of Goshen from the operation of the destructive visitations, prove, beyond a doubt, that they proceeded immediately from the hand of God.