Synopsis:
God tells Moses that he shall be a god to Pharaoh and Aaron
shall be his prophet. But this won’t work because God will harden Pharaoh’s
heart. So they go and do the trick with the Rod turning into snake but all of
Pharaoh’s magicians can do that trick too. Then they turn the Nile into blood
and it is smelly and no one can drink it, but the Magicians of Egypt can do the
same trick, so no big deal, Pharaoh still won’t let the Israelites go.
In other words:
Moses and Aaron do miracles for Pharaoh, but he isn’t
impressed.
Favorite bit:
That Moses is to take on the role of god in an effort to get
Pharaoh to let them go. So basically, Moses will be telling Aaron what to do
and Aaron will do it and this is supposed to make Pharaoh think Moses is a god.
I got an email on this post from Ryan - he gave me permission to share it here:
ReplyDeleteI continue to admire your tenacity with your reading of the Bible and your many questions addressed to the text. There was a time in progressive Biblical scholarship where liberals felt they had to find an explanation for these miracles. Now most realize that they had made an assumption that the event actually happened because it was in the Bible. The assumption that the event happened requires those who make that claim to produce the evidence and so far there is none. The mere mention in an ancient text of the event written some 600-800 years after the supposed event is not good evidence particularly in the light of obvious errors you have noted throughout the texts. When you give your opinion about what really happened, you are starting with the unfounded assumption that it really happened and I think that prolongs dealing with the high probability that the Bible is mostly all story and very little history.
Thanks for the feedback – that is me mostly trying to make sense of the story – not meant to be a commentary on whether it happened or not. I am reading the text as literature and I’ve made that very clear in the overview of the site. I’m trying to understand what the story itself is about and I’m a very visual thinker so if I come across a passage that doesn’t make sense – I think – well, what does make sense, what is it they are trying to describe? If I can’t do that I can’t really move on with the story. Like you notice I didn’t need to do that with the frogs or the lice or the flies. And I don’t feel the need to do that in every chapter. Because I’m a Humanist and a naturalist, I personally have to put miracles into a natural context to understand what physically they are describing in order for me to understand the story itself because in the story – the red river is important to the characters and the conflict and I know it wasn’t filled with blood. So my brain translated that into something I do understand so that I understand what the characters were dealing with. In this case, it sounds a lot like red tide to me. That I get and have experienced so I can understand motivations of Pharaoh and his magicians and how they responded to what Moses was doing. In this case they weren’t impressed, probably because they had seen it before because it was red tide. Because let’s face it – if it had been an impressive miracle Pharaoh would have caved. That’s not what happens in the story so understanding why was important to me.
DeleteI do the same thing with the visions btw – sounds like a hallucination to me. I can make sense of that. The pillar of fire and smoke on the mountain – sounds like a volcano. That makes sense to me. I want to have some sense of the natural phenomenon the characters in the story are dealing with and trying to describe so that I can understand the story.
I’m obviously not a biblical scholar and am not worried that by reading the Bible publicly I am somehow going to be taken as an authority or that someone is going to point to my commentary and say – see – Jen thinks it really happened it must be true. ;) I’d be rather shocked and surprised if that happened. I keep hoping someone who is more learned will join in and provide commentary and insight into the book to supplement my Bible as literature approach.
Hope this helps clarify
Ryan's response:
DeleteThanks for your comments, Jen. I do think you are being helpful to connect the writers imagination to things they either experienced or were things that had some connection with ideas or traditions in their culture. Please feel free to add any of my comments to the blog. I am curious about what kind of response you are getting and from people of what kind of background or perspective. Until you get that Biblical scholar (and perhaps even after), you might consider a good annotated Bible. The Access Bible published by Oxford University press is the best current one in my opinion for non-scholars. It uses the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible and the Apocrypha (the best current translation) and supplements that with annotations, short essays, a glossary, concordance, and maps, etc.