Exodus 7:15 Go to Pharaoh in the morning as he goes out to the river. Confront him on the bank of the Nile, and take in your hand the staff that was changed into a snake.
We recognize the difference between a WiKi article and the satire of BabylonBee, or at least I hope we do. We know the difference between love poetry and a political speech. We are aware of the cultural norms for various types of literature that are present in our culture. Tweets are different than BLOGs.
But all too often we don’t know the structures of ancient literature, especially of literature that is important to us and to our understanding of the universe. We read the Scriptures as though they didn’t have a structure inherent in them that was known and understood by both the ancient readers and writers and by their contemporaries. And these structures can help us understand the meaning of the text in new ways.
Take our text for instance. We find ourselves at the beginning of the Ten Plagues that the LORD brought upon Egypt and their gods. We tend to just read through the ten as though they were a modern news account of what happened without looking for an internal structure that might help us understand it better.
A quick summary of these plagues divides them into three sets of three, paralleling the two sets of three in the six days of creation. And just as there was structure between the first three days and the last three days of creation, so there is structure here that ties them together.
We see the first structure in our text. In plagues one, four and seven, Moses is told to go to Pharaoh in the morning and that the meeting is to take place by the river. In plagues two, five and eight, Moses is told to go to Pharaoh, presumably in his palace. In plagues three, six and nine, there is no warning, not notification that takes place. The plagues happen without Pharaoh getting his wakeup call.
And if you follow the language of the plagues, you will see that the language parallels the language of the order of creation itself. Water happens first, then things that crawl on the ground, then things that fly. Cattle get hit. People get hit. Even the light itself gets hit. Everything that the LORD said was good, gets reversed.
And in each phase of this battle, Pharaoh’s heart is a focus. Either his heart was hard, with an unknown hardener, he hardens his own heart, or the LORD hardens his heart. It isn’t until the fifth plague that the LORD responds with a hardening. Then it becomes like a drumbeat, the LORD hardening Pharaoh’s heart.
Ad all the while the LORD says repeatedly His expected outcome of this hardening in response to the plagues. The LORD’s name, His unique personal name, will be known and proclaimed among the nations.
But the LORD offers opportunity for grace to be received. In plague six, the hail, the LORD gives twenty four hour notice in order for the Egyptians to take steps to spare themselves the losses that will come. Some respond, but others ignore the grace filled warning. Some came to revere the LORD’s name, even in the middle of the plagues!
We tend to miss these grace moments because we read the text like a modern reader rather than through the lens of an ancient Israelite, someone who would memorize the Scriptures as part of their devotional life. Their history was not something that was in their past, it was something very much in their present moments. Their history continued to live on in their present lives. They were “people of the book.”
Are we people of the book, or is the Scriptures simply a collection of sayings, some of which spark our interest and temporarily lighten our mood? Become a person of the Book!
The Arnold Journey 