1. I have set you as a god to Pharaoh. The reiteration of this bold comparison may have a polemic motivation: Pharaoh imagines himself a god, but I have made you a god to Pharaoh.

3. I . . . shall harden Pharaoh’s heart, that I may multiply My signs and My portents. Whatever the theological difficulties, the general aim of God’s allowing, or here causing, Pharaoh to persist in his harshness is made clear: without Pharaoh’s resistance, God would not have the opportunity to deploy His great wonders and so demonstrate His insuperable power in history and the emptiness of the power attributed to the gods of Egypt. It should be noted that three different verbs are used in the story for the action on or in Pharaoh’s heart: hiqshah, “to harden” (the verb here), ḥizeq, “to toughen,” or in other contexts, “to strengthen” (the verb used in earlier passages), and kaved, literally, “to be heavy,” which in English unfortunately suggests sorrow when linked with the heart, and so has been rendered “harden” in this translation (as in verse 14). The force of all three idioms is to be stubborn, unfeeling, arrogantly inflexible, and there doesn’t seem to be much differentiation of meaning among the terms, though elsewhere ḥizeq linked with heart has a positive meaning—“to show firm resolve.”

4. I shall bring out My battalions, My people the Israelites. The opposition expresses a wry and surprising identification. God bears the epithet “LORD of Battalions” (“LORD of Hosts,” “LORD of Armies,” YHWH tsevaʾot), but here the “battalions” God calls His own turn out to be the people of Israel—in fact, a mass of wretched slaves who will be fleeing from their taskmasters.

9. let it become a serpent. The noun used here, tanin, is not the ordinary naḥash, “snake,” of the Burning Bush story. (When God in verse 15 refers to the staff that turned into a snake [naḥash], He may be alluding to the Burning Bush episode.) The tanin is usually a larger threatening reptile, as William H. C. Propp correctly observes, and is sometimes used for the Egyptian crocodile, or for a mythological dragon. The Hebrew zoological reference is clearly slippery, allowing a couple of commentators to see a Nilotic cobra in the transformed shepherd’s staff.

11. and they, too, the soothsayers of Egypt, did thus with their spells. The Hebrew word for “soothsayers,” ḥartumim, is a direct borrowing from the Egyptian designation for priest-magicians. The term translated as “spells,” lehatim, either is related to the root l-ʾ-t that means “to conceal” or, if one follows a proposal of Abraham ibn Ezra, is derived from the root l-h-t, “to flame out,” which he links with the fire-and-flash technique of the illusionist. Ibn Ezra, a rationalist, thus implies that the soothsayers’ success in transforming their staffs into serpents was an act of legerdemain. The ancient writer, however, seems to have assumed the efficacy of magic as a kind of technology: the point of the story is that the capacity of this technology was limited, and hence the authentically miraculous serpent into which Aaron’s staff has turned swallows up the other serpents.

13. Pharaoh’s heart toughened. In any case, Pharaoh is not impressed. Moses and Aaron, after all, have done no more than trump his sorcerers at their own game. What is called for in order to shake him is a series of truly cataclysmic miraculous events.

15. Look, he will be going out to the water. This narrative presupposes, at least on the information about Egypt available to the Hebrew writers, that Egyptian royalty regularly went down to the Nile to bathe, unless the purpose was, as ibn Ezra proposes, to check the level of the Nile. Pharaoh’s encounter with Moses by the riverside looks back to the discovery of Moses by Pharaoh’s daughter when she went down to the Nile.

16. Send off my people, that they may worship Me . . . you have not heeded. It should be observed that this prose narrative, in a style not evident in most other biblical stories, proceeds through the solemn, emphatic reiteration of refrainlike phrases and entire clauses, both in the language of the narrator and in the dialogue.

17. water . . . blood. For Egypt as a nation dependent on irrigation, the Nile with its fresh water is literally a lifeline. Blood in the Bible is imagined in radically ambiguous terms—the source and substance of life, an apotropaic and redemptive agent, the token of violence and death. It is manifestly the third of these meanings that is brought into play here, as the first plague symbolically anticipates the last one and deprives Egypt of life-sustaining water.

19. Nile channels. The Hebrew here converts the Egyptian loanword, yeʾor, “Nile,” into a plural. Elsewhere, in occasional poetic usage, this plural form is simply an elegant synonym for “streams” or “rivers.” In this Egyptian context, it seems more likely that it designates both the Nile itself and the system of irrigation canals built out from the Nile.

in the trees and in the stones. Many construe this as a reference to wooden and stone vessels or receptacles, but the plural form ʿetsim suggests trees rather than wood. In any case, trees and stones as objects in nature accord better with the catalogue of bodies of water that precedes than would household utensils. It has also been noted that the Hebrew pairing here, ʿetsim waʾavanim, is often used to refer to the material out of which idols are made.

20. he raised the staff. This would have to be Aaron.

before the eyes of Pharaoh and the eyes of his servants. The first spectacular cataclysm is devised so that they will be eyewitnesses to the fearful event. In most of these contexts, “servants” (it can also mean “slaves”) refers to Pharaoh’s courtiers.

21. and the Egyptians could not drink water from the Nile. One of the most frequently employed conventions of biblical narrative is the verbatim repetition of whole clauses, or even sequences of clauses, of narrative material—often, as here, once in dialogue and once in the narrator’s report. But the characteristic handling of this convention is to introduce small but quite revelatory divergences from verbatim replication as the material is repeated (see the comments on the elaborate near verbatim repetitions in Genesis 24 as a textbook illustration of this technique). Here, however, the point of the repetition seems to be that every term of God’s dire prediction (verse 18) is implemented as an accomplished event (verse 21), only the temporal aspects of the verbs shifting, with one minor substitution of a synonym—instead of “will not be able” (nilʾu), “could not” (loʾ-yakhlu). The summary clause at the end of the verse here, “and the blood was in all the land of Egypt,” is not part of the prediction in verse 18 but appears to be a digest of the panorama of sites to be struck in God’s instructions for Aaron in verse 19.

22. the soothsayers of Egypt did thus with their spells. Ibn Ezra wonders where they got water to turn into blood if Moses and Aaron had already done the trick for the Nile and all the rivers and ponds. His answer is that they performed their magic on water dug up from subterranean sources (verse 24), a conjuror’s act of transmutation that is not to be compared with the miraculous conversion of streams of flowing water into blood. Again, the reality of a technology of magic is not called into question but it is noteworthy that the soothsayers can do no more than effect a pale imitation of the destructive act of the God of the Hebrews; what they are powerless to do is to reverse the process of destruction.

25. And seven full days passed. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “and seven days were filled.” Many commentators infer that during this period the waters of the Nile returned to their original state; otherwise, the first plague alone would have been sufficient to make things utterly intolerable for Pharaoh.

26. Although the King James Version begins chapter 8 at this point, the Masoretic Text continues chapter 7 for four more verses, as here.

28. the Nile will swarm with frogs. The verb in the Hebrew is transitive (“will swarm frogs”). Several commentators have noticed that this word choice echoes the “swarming” of the proliferating Hebrews in chapter 1. There, the orgy of propagation seems to have struck the Egyptians as repellently reptilian; here, they are assaulted with a nauseating plague of amphibians. In this, as in other details of the Plagues narrative, the allusions to the Creation story, initially sounded in the first chapter of Exodus, turn into a network of reversals of the original creation. It would be excessive to insist that every detail of the narrative, or even every plague, confirms this pattern. Nevertheless, the allusions to early Genesis that are detectable trace a possibility that much exercised the imaginations of the biblical writers: if creation emerged at a particular moment in a process with discriminated stages, one could imagine an undoing of this event and this process, apocalypse being the other side of the coin of creation. The benign swarming of life in Genesis turns into a threatening swarm of odious creatures, just as the penultimate plague of darkness, prelude to mass death, is a reversal of the first “let there be light.” Alexander Pope, at the end of his great anticreation poem, The Dunciad, writes thoroughly in the spirit of these reversals when he announces of the new reign of anarchy, “Light dies before thy uncreating word.”

into your house . . . your bedchamber . . . your couch . . . your servants’ house. The all-powerful Pharaoh should be invulnerable to such violation and should be able to protect his people. Instead, what this fearful catalogue of penetrations conveys is the absolute, helpless exposure of all Egypt, from king to slave, from the intimate place of sleep and procreation to the places where food is prepared, in the face of God’s onslaught.

29. upon you. The Hebrew preposition would normally mean “into you,” which led the Talmud (Sanhedrin 80) to amplify the idea of grotesque penetration by saying that the frogs would croak from inside the guts of the Egyptians.