A Journey Through the Bible: Exodus 7 and 8

Exodus 7:5—”And the Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD, when I stretch out My hand on Egypt and bring out the children of Israel from among them." The Egyptians might have learned that Jehovah was God, but they didn’t remember it for very long. They had a very complex religion which included just about everything from totem poles to theology, and influenced literature, government, art—all aspects of society except perhaps morality. In the beginning was the sky; that and the Nile River were the chief divinities. Constellations and stars might be gods, too. Sahu and Sopdit (Orion and Sirius) were tremendous deities. Sahu ate gods three times a day regularly. Sometimes he ate the moon, but only for a moment; prayers of men and the anger of other gods forced him to vomit it up. The moon was a god, too, but the greatest god of all was the sun, Amon-re, or sometimes called Horus. Nearly everything, at some point in Egyptian history, was worshipped—the bull, crocodile, hawk, cow, goose, goat, ram, cat, dog, chicken, swallow, jackal, serpent—and they allowed some of them to roam as freely as the cow in India today. Sometimes women were offered to certain of these animals as sexual mates; the bull in particular received that honor (the bull was the incarnation of the god, Orisis, who was god of the dead). What it all pointed to was immortality. To the Egyptian, the body was inhabited by a small replica of itself, the “ka,” and also by a soul—all three, body, ka, and soul survived the appearance of death. When an Egyptian died, he made his appearance before Osiris. If he was clean from sin, he would be permitted to live forever in the “Happy Field of Food,” those heavenly gardens where there would always be abundance and security. These nice fields, however, could only be reached with the aid of a ferryman, and this old gentleman would receive into his boat only such men and women as had done no evil in their lives. Osiris would question the dead, weighing each candidate’s heart in the scale against a feather to test his truthfulness. Those who failed this final examination were condemned to live forever in their tombs, hungering and thirsting, fed upon by hideous crocodiles, and never coming forth to see the sun.

One last point about Egyptian religion, of which I only touched the merest hem of the garment: Pharaoh was a god-king, and it was his association with the gods that was the source of his power and authority. We read of no police force in ancient Egypt; since they had a supreme “god” on earth—Pharaoh—that was sufficient for social control. Of course, crime happened, but for the Egyptian, Pharaoh’s divinity was enough to ensure proper living. It would be nice to see religion have that kind of effect in America today. As James Madison said, if all men were angels, we wouldn’t need government.

Exodus 8:19—“Then the magicians said to Pharaoh, "This is the finger of God." But Pharaoh's heart grew hard, and he did not heed them, just as the LORD had said.” Up until this plague (the lice), the Egyptian magicians had been able to, at least to some degree, duplicate what Moses and Aaron had done. These conjurers probably believed that the two Hebrews were tricksters like themselves. Frankly, magicians of today have little over the magicians of the ancient world. They knew ruses that would stump the ablest of modern conjurers. But, with the plague of lice, the power of Jehovah exceeded the Egyptians’ best efforts and they were honest enough to recognize and admit the limitations to their abilities. Unfortunately, it would take several more such exercises of true divine power before Pharaoh would be convinced of the superiority of the Hebrew God and allow His people to leave Egypt. And even then, he had a change of mind (see Exodus 14).