1. And the LORD said to Moses. There is a problem about where to locate this speech temporally and spatially. In the immediately preceding verses, Pharaoh had warned Moses on pain of death never to see him again, and Moses had grimly concurred that he would never again see the Egyptian king. Verse 8, however, makes it clear that Moses is standing in Pharaoh’s presence and announcing the tenth plague to Pharaoh. This speech to Pharaoh (verses 4–8), then, would have to be the continuation and conclusion of the angry confrontation reported at the end of the previous chapter. God’s words to Moses (verses 1–3) do not seem smoothly integrated into the narrative progress, at any rate, not according to modern expectations of narrative continuity. Abraham ibn Ezra points out that most of this material is a restatement of God’s predictions to Moses in the Burning Bush episode. The passage thus may be understood as a summarizing recapitulation—Umberto Cassuto sees it as a kind of flashback in Moses’s mind—of God’s initial promise to confound Egypt and to liberate Israel before the annunciation of the last plague.

send you off . . . drive you out. Again, the semantically multiple “send” (“to dismiss,” “to free,” “to divorce,” “to take ceremonious leave of”) is interpreted as brutal expulsion.

3. The man Moses, too, was very great. The logical connection with the preceding sentence seems to run along the following lines: just as the rank-and-file Israelites have made the sort of appealing or superior impression on the Egyptians that encourages the bestowal of gifts, the leader of the Hebrews exerts a powerful charisma that confirms or enhances the standing of his followers in Egyptian eyes.

5. from the firstborn of Pharaoh sitting on his throne to the firstborn of the slavegirl . . . behind the millstones. Of all the catalogues to indicate the comprehensiveness of the plague about to be enacted, this is of course the scariest. Cassuto locates the phrase “the slavegirl behind the millstones” in an Egyptian document and suggests it may have been proverbial in Egypt for the lowest of the low; this would be another instance of an authentic touch of Egyptian local color in this narrative.

6. outcry. The Hebrew tseʿaqah, which has also been used for the cries of anguish of the Israelites in their oppression, has a semantic range that goes between “cry” and “scream.”

7. But against all the Israelites no dog will snarl. That is, not even a menacing gesture toward them will be made. The literal meaning of the idiom used here is “no dog will sharpen its tongue.” Dogs, which were not kept as pets in ancient Israel, have a consistently negative valence in biblical literature as images of malefic hostility or of abasement.

8. And all these servants of yours. Since the beginning of Moses’s speech, “And Moses said,” lacks the usual “to Pharaoh” (perhaps because this piece of dialogue is a direct continuation of their previous exchange), it is only now that we can be certain that these words are addressed to Pharaoh, “your servants” referring to Pharaoh’s courtiers.

Go out . . . I will go out . . . And he went out. The Hebrew for the Exodus from Egypt is yetsiʾat mitsrayim, “the going-out from Egypt.” Here that crucial verbal stem becomes the thematic key word of Moses’s “last confrontation” with Pharaoh before the actual exodus. The first two occurrences of the verb in this verse refer to the Hebrews’ leaving Egypt; the third occurrence indicates Moses’s angry departure from the court, which through the very repetition of the verb also is made a kind of foreshadowing of the Israelite departure from Egypt. All three of these uses of the verb play against God’s “going out in the midst of Egypt” (verse 4), where the same verb appears to have a military sense—“to go out on a sortie,” or, as elsewhere in this translation, “to sally forth.”

in a flare of anger. Both Rashi and ibn Ezra link this causally to Pharaoh’s “Do not again see my face.” Since Pharaoh has offered no response to Moses’s terrifying announcement of the death of the firstborn, he clearly remains implacable, and hence Moses’s anger—the first explicit indication of such a reaction by him in all his clashes with Pharaoh.

9–10. Pharaoh will not heed you . . . Moses and Aaron had done these portents . . . the LORD toughened Pharaoh’s heart. All this material in virtually the same verbal formulation appears earlier in the narrative—indeed, as early as the initiating episode of the Burning Bush, like the material enunciated here in verses 1–3. Its function at this point before the last night in Egypt is, as Cassuto suggests, a summarizing recapitulation. The first three verses of the chapter and these last two thus form a kind of recapitulative framework for Moses’s final confrontation with Pharaoh, reminding us that it is the prelude to the climactic fulfillment of the divine promise given to Moses at Horeb. The function of recapitulation is grammatically indicated by the use of a pluperfect verb: “Moses and Aaron had done these portents.” The portents, of course, have proved unavailing, and so the stage is set for carrying out God’s grim pledge to Moses at Horeb to kill the firstborn of Egypt.