What we want to do here is to begin to observe some of the patterns and to see how the plagues point us back to creation (and thus forward to the new creation), point us forward to the final plague and the Exodus event, and also thus point us forward to the work of Jesus Christ who died the curse of the final plague and began the new creation of the new heavens and earth with His resurrection. You can do the work of seeing Jesus in all of this easily. Pete Enns' commentary and class discussion at WTS is the source for most if not all of these observations.

The snake incident shares some of the characteristics of the plagues and thus we will discuss it here, but the first nine plagues are each a series of three plagues. You know that this is intentional because they follow a pattern. In each series of three plagues the first two have a warning beforehand and the third comes without warning. Moreover, the first warning is always in the morning. And the instructions given to Moses and Aaron follow the pattern of "station yourself" for the first in each series, "go to Pharaoh" for the second in each series, and no formula for the one without warning. And it is also worth observing that you will see that these plagues are comprehensive -- frogs from water, gnats from earth, and flies from the air (for example).

Pharoah's magicians can imitate the plagues through the frogs, close to their strength at the Nile, but they cannot undo any of the plagues. Only God has the power to bring order out of chaos, but at least for the early plagues they are able to imitate these reversals of creation. It is also worth saying that God needs no magician to do these things.

The reason for the plagues is that Israel may know that there is no one like the LORD our God (Exo 8:10) and Israel's protection from their effects is so that they may know that He is the LORD in the midst of the earth (Exo 8:22). And they serve the same purpose for the Egyptians -- so that you may know that there is none like Him in all the earth (Exo 9:14). Other ways this is put include: "so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth" (Exo 9:16), "so that you may know that the earth is the LORD's (Exo 9:29), "that you may know that I am the LORD" (Exo 10:2), and this is the same reason laid out for everything in the book: "the Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD" (Exo 14:4) and "you shall know that I am the LORD your God" (Exo 16:12), etc. Thus it is no surprise that the plagues will show us the LORD God as the creator God and show Him defeating the Egyptian pantheon.

While the translation quotes in the paragraph above are from the ESV, for the comments below see the NIV and earlier posts.

The snake incident (Exo 7:8-13) uses a different word for snake or serpent here than it did earlier in Exodus (look back at the instructions). The word here is the same word as "sea monster" from Gen 1:21. The snake was the sign of Egyptian royalty (with their cobra headdress). (As defeats of Pharaoh they were defeats of the one who claimed to be the son of a god.) And it points us forward to the Exodus event because the word "to swallow" is found only here and in Exo 15:12 for the sea swallowing Pharaoh's army.

The plague transforming water into blood (Exo 7:14-25) uses a word sometimes translated reservoirs (Exo 7:19, NIV), which is the same Hebrew word translated "collected mass" in Gen 1:10. It is a rare word. The Nile was a personified deity for Egypt with the name Hapi. Thus the first Egyptian deity is shown to be powerless. The first Pharaoh had used the Nile to try to kill the children of God. All of these water episodes point us to when God will divide the waters again and dry land appear in the Exodus event.

The plague of frogs (Exo 8:1-15) uses the word "to swarm" of Gen 1:28. It is a creation reversal because the animals are ruling instead of man. Heqet, the goddess of childbirth, was drawn with the head of a frog. Thus another false god is exposed as powerless, with the frogs coming from the Nile. And that she is the goddess of childbirth is interesting. It points us to the exodus event because it comes from the Nile and leaves behind the smell of death.

The plague of gnats (Exo 8:16-19) has these insects come from the ground like how man came from the dust (Gen 2:7). The gnats are the princes of Egypt rather than Pharaoh (cf. 1 Sam 2:6-8 and 1 Kings 16:1-3). Man as a result of the curse returns to the dust upon death. Thoughts about death point us to the Exodus event result for Egypt.

The plague of flies (Exo 8:20-32) again shows us the creation reversal motif. The land is left destroyed. There is no known reference to the Egyptian pantheon but the word "destroyed" in Exo 8:24 is the same as the destroyer in Exo 12:23, thus pointing us to the final plague and therefore to the Exodus event.

The plague on the livestock (Exo 9:1-7) again reminds us of Genesis 1 since they were created on the same day as humankind and the latter was to rule over them. Hathor, the mother and sky goddess, was depicted as a cow. Death of these livestock points us to the final plague and thus the Exodus event, which also kills animals (Exo 11:5 and 12:29).

The plague of boils (Exo 9:8-12) is an obvious blight on the creation of man. This was an attack on Pharaoh who made them make bricks. The dust causing the boils is from the kiln. The bricks were kiln-baked bricks. This skin disease would disrupt Egyptian religious practices. This is the first plague damaging human life.

The plague of hail (Exo 9:13-35) affects the plant world. A word for vegetation in Exo 9:22 is in Gen 1:11-12. The god Seth showed himself in wind and storm. The god Min was tied to the harvest schedule. Hail is often a sign of divine judgment and it does kill the humans who are outside.

The plague of locusts (Exo 10:1-20) mentions the rest of the vegetation of Genesis 1. It is a polemic against Isis and Min like the last plague. The locusts come by an east wind, just like the wind that will divide the Sea and the locusts drown in the same sea where "not one survived" (Exo 10:19 and 14:28). It is called a deadly plague and causes darkness foreshadowing the next two plagues.

The plague of darkness (Exo 10:21-29) reverses Genesis 1:3. It is a polemic against Re, the sun god. Pharaoh claimed to be the son of the sun god. Darkness is symbolic of death in Scripture (i.e. Job 17:13, Psa 143:3).

There are ten plagues, thus the tenth plague is the fullness of the plagues. Many of the first nine plagues foreshadowed it. It reverses the creation of man by bringing their death. It is a defeat of the Egyptian god of the dead Osiris. It destroyed the firstborn cattle too. Cattle were venerated in Egyptian religion. Since this is a plague on the firstborn it represents what will happen to all of the Egyptian men who come out after Israel into the Sea of Reeds. It is really part of the Exodus event and foreshadows the rest of what will happen.

Remember that these plagues also ultimately foreshadow the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. For example, there was darkness before His death.

Labels: exodus, false gods, Genesis 1, new creation, pharaoh, plagues, serpent

The Hebrew people are the seed of the woman. Pharaoh is the seed of the serpent. This is fitting since you often see the Pharaohs depicted with a serpent's headdress. The new Pharaoh did not have a good relationship with Joseph or his kinsmen (he did not "know" Joseph) but the irony of ironies is that we do not know the name of this Pharaoh. This is surely intentional because Pharaoh defies God and the seed of the woman first by enslaving the Israelites, then by asking the midwives to kill the Hebrew children, and finally by ordering all of the new children to be thrown into the Nile. But it also reveals a tendency of the book to strategically use or leave out names. The threat of drowning in the Nile points us back to creation where the waters separate and dry land comes forth as well as new creation in the Exodus where the waters separate and dry land appears.

Enter Moses (Exodus 2:1ff). We know something special is about to occur because a Levite married a Levite and she conceived and bore him a son (like John the Baptist in Luke 1:5). This child is being depicted as the firstborn son and literally what she sees is new creation language "that it/he was good" (Exo 2:2) like we saw in Genesis 1. And when she could not hide him any longer she put him in an ark (the same word as the ark that Noah built and both have pitch) and placed him among the reeds. This was a traditional way to introduce a hero, like the Legend of King Sargon of Akkad who also was put in a reed basket treated with bitumen and found by a drawer of water who raised him as her own. We know that Moses will do great things. This story points us forward to the Exodus event in the Sea of Reeds. All you have to do to the word reed in Hebrew is move the dot for the vowel and you have the word extinction. This is the threat of the Nile -- extinction for Israel and this is the threat of the Sea of Reeds, the Sea of Extinction, at the Exodus event. But Moses and Israel will come through these waters as new creation.

Then all of the sudden we find out that despite the earlier portrayal Moses has an older sister. He also has an older brother but this information is conveniently left out. In Exodus 7:7, Moses is eighty and Aaron is eighty-three. So there must be a theological reason that Moses is portrayed as the firstborn son (perhaps the same reason that God would call Israel his firstborn son later in this section). And the account does not tell us anyone's names, not Moses' parents, or sister, or the name of Pharaoh's daughter, because it is driving us to the naming of Moses (2:10). And the explanation of the name is "because I drew him out of the water." Moses puts this theological meaning of his name on the lips of Pharaoh's daughter because she unknowingly points to the Exodus event in naming him something that sounds like "draw out" in Hebrew. In reality, the name Moses in Egyptian means "to give birth to" because she was claiming that he was her own son.

Moses through all of this points us forward to Jesus Christ. Jesus was the firstborn son of Mary and Joseph. He was the seed of the woman. And Herod, the new Pharaoh and seed of the serpent, would try to kill the children under two. But Joseph and Mary would flee the new Egypt (literally Israel, see Matthew 2:15). Jesus went through this Exodus from Egypt now as an individual, again at his baptism as an individual, and later would again on behalf of His people. The last time He did so as the ark of salvation for a greater Exodus.

Moses also went through three exodus events. The first was as an individual being drawn out of the water by the daughter of Pharaoh. The last was the Exodus event of his people. But the other time he went through an exodus as an individual was precipitated by a fight between two Hebrew people. First Moses sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew and Moses acts as the savior of Israel. This was not murder just as what God would do later was not murder. Moses was acting as God's anointed deliverer ahead of time. And then he saw one of the Hebrews doing the same thing to another one of the Hebrews (the word kill in Exo 2:12, NIV is the same as hit in Exo 2:13, NIV -- see Exo 2:12-13, ESV). And we get a preview of Israel's rebellion and rejection of Moses -- two themes that will continue and will recur for Jesus.

So Moses flees (exodus) to the Midianites (remember it was the Midianites who brought Joseph into Egypt at the start of Book Ten of Genesis). It is not accidental that when Moses delivered Israel by killing the Egpytian they grumbled and when he delivered the daughters of Jethro they sing his praises. Jesus would receive the same kinds of reception from Israel and the Gentiles. And the passage ends with God remembering His covenant, God seeing the people, "and God knew." Pharaoh may not have known Joseph but God knew. This is also an allusion to Sodom (Gen 18:21). God saw and God knew. He was going to come down. And ultimately He did in the person of Jesus Christ.

We have stressed the first two chapters in this post to get you to slow down and see the connections. What follows are some notes on the rest of the section to help you do the same with the other chapters.

First note that the burning bush is a suspension of the normal properties of nature. We are going to see creation reversal and other suspensions of normal properties of nature throughout the book of Exodus.

Second, the name of God, YHWH, was undoubtedly already known to the people of Israel. What is new is the theological explanation of the meaning of the name.

Also, Moses acts as a shepherd, which prepares him to be the shepherd of God's people. The first sign is a snake that Moses must grab in faith -- a snake like Pharaoh. The second sign shows that God can make the unclean Hebrews clean. Moses complains that he is not eloquent. No matter what God does, Moses acts like Israel and grumbles. So as a judgment the office is split in two and Moses shares the glory of God with Aaron. The point of all this is that I Am and not Moses will deliver Israel. And all of these things point us to Jesus.

The genealogy is interesting. It slows down for Levi. Again the names mentioned are significant. The women point us to the focus of the genealogy. Moses is not the focus, Aaron is. This is because Aaron has just been chosen to help Moses. And the genealogy points to Aaron's worthiness by showing his Levitical heritage and that he is the grandfather of Phinehas who would be a hero in Numbers (and later in Joshua).

There is also something significant going on with the age of Moses. Moses was probably forty when he fled Egypt the first time (according to tradition he was), He was eighty when he led the Exodus of Israel (Exo 7:7). Thus Moses spent forty years in the wilderness after his own personal exodus and forty years in the wilderness after the Exodus event. He died at 120 years old (40+40+40).

In any case, this section of Exodus foreshadows the plagues and the Exodus event and therefore also foreshadows the work of Jesus climaxing in His exodus. Thus salvation from the land of Egypt, the house of slavery foreshadows salvation from slavery to sin.

All of my posts on Exodus include things that I originally learned from Dr. Peter Enns about four years ago. I highly suggest that you read his commentary on Exodus in the NIV Application Commentary series. They are more immediately based on my notes on Exodus for a class I taught at Roxborough Presbyterian on how Exodus points us to Jesus. Any mistakes are my own.

Labels: christ, exodus, moses, new creation, pharaoh, seed, serpent

The key to seeing what is most important to the author is noticing the compositional strategy of the book. Most of the books in Genesis follow the following pattern: heading ("these are the generations of..."), narrative, poetry, epilogue. Actually Sailhamer, as mentioned in my earlier post, "The Way of Wisdom: The Canon and Cessation," notes that narrative, poetry, epilogue is the compositional strategy of the whole of Genesis and the whole of the Torah. In this strategy the key is the poetry. The difference between this book and most of those in Genesis is that the pattern of narrative, poetry, epilogue takes place thrice.

Genesis 2:4 is the heading for the second book: "These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that YHWH God made the earth and the heavens." It is worth noting, since this is a common structure in Genesis, that the mention of heavens, earth, earth, heavens is a chiastic pattern. Also the heading is artificially contrived to maintain continuity with the rest of the ten headings in the whole of Genesis. (Ten being a consistently significant number for fullness.) The title does not tell us who the book is about, instead the book is about this person's descendants. Thus, the first book is about the "descendants" of the heavens and the earth.

Within the narratival sections there is a general pattern. Each one begins with the problem, the response to the problem, and interaction between the person(s) involved and God. In the first panel (Gen 2:5-22) the main problem is that the earth has not yet brought forth vegetation (Gen 1:12) because it had not rained. It is also noted that there was no man, thus no irrigation. God solves these problems one at a time. First with rain, as translated by Lee Irons and Meredith Kline in "The Framework View" in The G3n3s1s Debate, "So a rain-cloud began to arise from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground." The word translated "rain-cloud" is only found in Scripture in Job and is found in another ANE language. In Job and the other language it means, "rain-cloud." (Not to mention that this translation makes sense as the solution to the problem introduced.) The other part is then solved by making man and designating him as the priest who guards or keeps the garden (Gen 2:15). God tells the man not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (a probationary test) and after making the land animals and birds then makes woman. The act of naming the animals shows Adam's servant-king power over the creation.

In the second panel (Gen 3:1-13) the problem is the serpent. Adam is the one to blame in the text because he had been given the role of the priest ("guard" the garden). Adam's response to the problem, however, was not to stand up to the serpent but to buy into his lies. In this panel the interaction between God and man is one of judgment. The picture is that of Judgment Day, or as it is often referred to in Scripture "the day" -- thus "And they heard the sound of YHWH God walking in the garden in the Spirit of The Day" (Gen 3:8). Adam and Eve hid because they knew it was The Day "for in The Day that you eat of it you shall surely die" (Gen 2:17). The judgment day motif is complete with the sound of YHWH, which elsewhere in Scripture is described as incredibly loud and similar to that of a huge army. And the Spirit of God, usually translated with the silly "cool" idea of wind, should be identified with the Spirit of God from Gen 1:2 that hovered like a bird over the face of the waters. The response of Adam and Eve to the questioning in the court of judgment was to pass the blame. Adam blamed God and the woman. Eve blamed the serpent. It is not much of a step to Cain's "Am I my brother's keeper?" (Gen 4:9).

In the third panel (Gen 4:1-22) the problem is that "Cain brought to YHWH an offering of the fruit of the ground." Abel's offering was accepted because it was the firstborn of his flock, but Cain's offering was not the firstfruits of the ground. And Cain's sin mastered him as he killed Abel in premeditated murder in the field. Unlike in later Scripture where the death penalty is prescribed for murderers, God spares Cain and protects him. The genealogy offered in this chapter includes several interesting things worth noting. As we have been stressing structure, you should number the genealogy with Lamech as number seven. Cain is number 2, Enoch is number 3, Irad is number 4, etc. Number seven will without a doubt be significant. And Lamech is significant because he shows that sin has escalated out of control to a climax ready for God's judgment since he has two wives in contrast with the teaching of the first panel of marriage between one man and one woman and is a murderer (this we discover in the poetry). The genealogy is also structurally interesting because Lamech has three sons Jabal, Jubal, and Tubal-cain. Adam also had three sons, Cain, Abel and Seth, and Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth.

Most important in this book's structure is the poetry. In panel one the poetry is Gen 2:23: "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man." In panel two the poetry is Gen 3:14-19. The most quoted portion of this poem is the protoevangelium: "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel" (Gen 3:15). The poetry in the third panel is Lamech's curse where he boasts of murdering a young man for striking him and calls for revenge seventy-sevenfold. Unlike Cain, Lamech does not want his family to wait for God's vengeance but to take unbridled revenge into their own hands if anyone touches him. This is the perfect example of disproprotionate response -- Lamech kills a man for hitting him and if anyone kills him in reply he calls for seventy-sevenfold retaliation. Lamech's words are the anti-gospel. All of this poetry points to Jesus Christ. Jesus is the new Adam and his church is the Woman, bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh. Jesus is the seed ("offspring") of the woman who bruises the head of the serpent. And Jesus is the one who goes through the curse of death on the cross for our sins and leads us to forgive seventy-sevenfold as he forgives his murderers.

The rest of the text in each panel (the remainer of each chapter) are the epilogues. The first epilogue shows a happy relationship between man and wife without shame. Shame would require clothing in the second panel (first they clothe themselves, but in the epilogue God sacrifices an animal to give them garments of skin). The epilogue also explains the continuing application of the poetry to the life of God's people ("a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and they shall become one flesh" Gen 2:24). In the second panel, the continuing consequence is being driven from the mountain-garden of fruitfulness (Eden) so that man would not eat of the tree of life and seal himself to continue forever in his fallen estate. The way to the tree of life is through the sword of the circumcision of Christ on the cross. And in the third panel we see the birth of Seth. Seth's son Enosh would be the heir of Abel as this is the first example of a common practice in Israel (for example Boaz does this in the book of Ruth for Elimelech and his son Mahlon). This is why Enosh is mentioned here: Abel has his heir and the book can conclude on a note of hope with calling upon the name of YHWH.

We could examine these three chapters and note a great many more details. My reflections here owe much to my professors at Westminster Theological Seminary, the works of Meredith Kline, and the commentary of Bruce Waltke. As always I have added my own observations and analysis and any mistakes are my own.

Labels: abel, cain, Genesis, Genesis 1, kline, lamech's curse, protoevangelium, sailhamer, serpent