2. and you still hold on to them. As we move to the end of the first half of the Ten Plagues, a note of impatience is introduced into God’s words through Moses to Pharaoh as this clause is added to the formulaically repeated language. Perhaps this new emphasis on Pharaoh’s continuing torment of Israel is the reason that Rashi surprisingly glosses the transparent verb “hold on to,” maḥaziq, by citing a bizarre parallel from Deuteronomy 25: “should . . . she reach out her hand and seize [or hold on to] his pudenda.”

3. the hand of the LORD is about to be against your livestock. The Hebrew verb here has a spine-tingling effect for which there is no obvious English equivalent. The verb “to be” in Hebrew is not supposed to have a participial, or present, tense. At this ominous and supernatural juncture, however, that verbal stem h-y-h yields an anomalous hoyah, rendered in this translation as “about to be.” This strange usage involves a kind of fearsome pun on the divine name YHWH that was mysteriously highlighted in the Burning Bush episode. God’s intrinsic and unique capacity for being, we are made to see, is not just a matter of static condition but an awesome power of action—the hand that is “about to be” against all the livestock of Egypt.

camels. As in Genesis, the reference is anachronistic. Although camels were widely introduced to Mesopotamia and the land of Israel by early in the first millennium B.C.E., they were not used in Egypt until several centuries later; and in any case, the actual setting of the Exodus story would be some time in the thirteenth century B.C.E.

4. the LORD will set apart. The theme of the setting apart of the Hebrews from the Egyptians, first introduced in the previous plague, is again stressed.

7. Pharaoh’s heart hardened. This is one of many instances in which the literal meaning of the verb is “became heavy.” That usage in turn echoes ironically against the qualifying adjective of “a very heavy pestilence” (verse 3).

8. Take you handfuls of soot from the kiln and let Moses throw it toward the heavens. The beginning of the second half of the Ten Plagues is marked by a switch from the set formula for launching the plague with an outstretched staff. This scooping up of soot and casting it skyward intensifies the ominousness of the moment and has the look of an act of sympathetic magic. The black dust from the kiln turns into broadcast contamination, a plague clearly paired with the preceding plague of livestock pestilence but affecting man as well as beast.

9. burning rash. The Hebrew sheḥin obviously refers to a painful skin disease, but no definitive identification of the malady has been made. The noun is probably related to a root that means “to be hot”—Rashi cites the rabbinic idiom shanah sheḥunah, “a torrid year”—and hence this translation represents it as “burning rash.” The fact that the plague is inaugurated with soot taken from a kiln may reinforce an association between burning heat and the skin disease in question.

11. the soothsayers could not stand before Moses because of the burning rash. Their repeated gesture in the earlier plagues of a weak imitation of Moses vanishes. After “could not,” on the basis of 8:14, we might have expected something like “cure the burning rash.” In fact, the soothsayers, themselves painfully smitten by the maddening skin disease, are in no condition to make any effort of the sort but instead flee from Moses’s presence. There is added irony in the idiom used, for “to stand before” elsewhere has the sense of “stand in attendance upon.” In any case, what was noxious in the earlier plagues has now become physically unbearable.

12. And the LORD toughened Pharaoh’s heart. For the first time, it is not Pharaoh, or his heart, that is the subject of the verb of obduracy but God. However, in the biblical perspective this may amount to the same thing because God is presumed to be the ultimate cause of human actions, and Pharaoh’s stubborn arrogance can still be understood as the efficient cause. It is striking that Pharaoh persists in his resistance even as his afflicted soothsayers, the experts upon whom he has been depending, flee the scene.

14. I am about to send. The Hebrew writer cannot resist any opportunity to confront the two senses of “send”—the sending off or dismissal that Pharaoh is unwilling to implement and the dire sending by God of plague after plague.

16. so as to show you My power, and so that My name will be told through all the earth. Here we are given an emphatic summary of the theological rationale for the elaborate and excruciating sequence of plagues. The God of Israel is above all a God of history. His unrivaled supremacy as God is manifested for the Hebrew writers by His powerful acts in the arena of history. The Exodus story is conceived as an establishing of the credentials of the God of Israel for all humankind. Hence his awesome power has to be demonstrated in one plague after another, and Pharaoh’s repeated resistance is a required condition of the demonstration. The scope of the demonstration is also noteworthy. The elastic Hebrew term ʾerets, which until this point in the Plagues narrative had meant “land” (as in “the land of Egypt”), clearly here means “earth”: YHWH’s mighty acts in Egypt are to confirm his reputation as omnipotent deity throughout the world.

17. You still block the way to My people. The meaning of the Hebrew verb here, mistolel, has long been in dispute. This translation presumes a connection with the military term soleleh, “siege-ramp,” which might imply that Pharaoh is keeping the Hebrews penned in as a besieging army would do to the population trapped within a city.

18. from the day of its founding until now. As the plagues are intensified, rhetorical drum-rolls such as this punctuate the report of the catastrophes. Compare verse 24, “the like of which there had not been in all the land of Egypt from the time it became a nation.”

19. Every man and the beasts. The beasts are a little puzzling because verse 6 clearly reports a total destruction of Egyptian livestock. Perhaps all the reports of general destruction are meant to be taken as hyperboles; in any case, it seems unwise to look for absolute logical consistency in this narrative, which is chiefly focused on conveying a sense of grand cumulative catastrophe.

indoors. The literal meaning of the Hebrew is “in the house.” The house/field antonyms in biblical Hebrew (bayit/sadeh) also have the idiomatic sense in some contexts of inside and outside.

20. Whoever feared the LORD’s word. Elsewhere, this is an idiom that indicates piety (as in “God-fearing”), but here the idiom has been stripped down to its literal meaning: whoever was struck with terror by this grim threat of God’s took the necessary steps to protect his slaves and livestock. The existence of a contingent of Egyptians now genuinely terrified by the dire predictions of the Hebrews is an indication of developing cracks in the pharaonic front.

23. the LORD let loose thunder and hail, and fire went along earthward. The dramatic nature of this plague is another manifestation of the pattern of intensification. Instead of disaster welling up from the Nile or somehow coming through the air, it appears here as a direct and violent assault from above against the land of Egypt. In biblical poetry, as in its Canaanite antecedents, thunder and lightning are the characteristic weapons of the sky god. The raining down of celestial fire also sets up an allusive correspondence with the story of the destruction of Sodom.

went along earthward. Instead of the standard form for the Hebrew verb “to go” (telekh), the writer uses a dialectic variant form (tihalakh) rarely employed in the Bible and perhaps felt to be archaic, as a kind of epic gesture. “Went along earthward” seeks to produce an equivalent strangeness of effect while replicating the rhythm of the Hebrew.

26. Only in the land of Goshen . . . was there no hail. The setting apart of Israelite Goshen from the rest of Egypt is extended here into an implicit image of a kind of protective canopy—we would say, umbrella—shielding the Hebrews from the destructive wrath pouring down from the sky.

27. I have offended this time. The terrifying display of celestial violence for the first time triggers a confession of wrongdoing from Pharaoh (and the terms “in the right,” tsadiq, and “in the wrong,” reshaʿim, reflect legal usage). But “this time” is restrictive, as though Pharaoh were suggesting: I did nothing to offend before now, but I admit, in the face of the destruction hurled from the heavens, that this time I have done wrong.

28. no more. Literally, “enough” or “much.”

29. spread out my hands. Spreading out the hands (literally, “palms”) is a gesture of prayer or supplication.

the earth is the LORD’s. Again, the scope of the theological argument reaches beyond the confines of the land of Egypt: the God Who has wreaked such inconceivable destruction on the great empire of Egypt is surely the God of all the earth.

30. And as for you and your servants, I know that you still do not fear the LORD God. Moses appears to be shrewdly reading the grudging nature of Pharaoh’s admission, “I have offended this time.” And Pharaoh’s reversal of direction after each of the previous plagues scarcely inspires confidence that he has now undergone a change of heart. The phrase “you still do not fear the LORD God” neatly straddles both senses of the idiom (see the comment on verse 20); Pharaoh is far from fearing the LORD, as Moses recognizes, in the sense of pious submission to divine authority. He does fear the LORD’s destructive power—that is why he is pleading with Moses—but probably not sufficiently to prevent him from renewing his obduracy.

31. flax and barley. Umberto Cassuto reminds us that flax was used to make linen, a principal Egyptian fabric for clothing (and also an important Egyptian export item), and goes on to suggest that the barley would have been used for cheap bread to feed slaves.

34. and he continued to offend. This phrase was not used in the earlier reports of the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart. It is directly motivated by the language of his confession: after saying “I have offended this time” as the thunder and hail rattle down, he finds himself once more under blue skies and directly proceeds to offend again by reneging on his promise to send off the Hebrews.