But Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you, that I may lay my hand upon Egypt, and bring forth mine armies, and my people the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great judgments.
Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you, that I may lay my hand upon Egypt. The succession of terrible judgments with which the country was about to be scourged would fully demonstrate the supremacy of Israel's God. It is a very partial and incomplete view of the momentous transactions which were enacted on the field of Zoan to consider them as designed to accomplish the deliverance of the Israelites from Egyptian bondage. That certainly was one part of the plan. But a far higher and more enlarged purpose was contemplated by those miraculous occurances-namely, that of opposing and destroying the power and influence of Egyptian idolatry. The contest was not so much with the monarch himself as with the idols in whom he trusted; and the genuine miracles served, by the repeated humiliations they gave to his pride and self-will, to expose the helplessness and futility of the idols in which he confided. In short, it was a controversy of the true God with false deities in the stronghold of idolatry; and it is necessary for the reader to carry this view along with him in the perusal of the ensuing narrative in order to perceive the special appropriateness and significance of the wonders which, in a continuous series, were done in the land of Ham.