As is always the way when Yahweh fights the gods, there’s not any combat, the actions of the Lord simply show them to be impotent before him. The first three plagues fit in a pattern of water, earth, and sky (nile →  frogs →  gnats), which is the biblical layering of the cosmos (waters below, earth, heavens above). We are meant to read and notice not just Yahweh’s conquering of foreign gods but his mastery of the whole world. 

We don’t like the ten plagues in Exodus, they feel like exactly the sort of thing we secretly wish wasn’t in the Old Testament because they afflict our innate sense of fairness and our unexpressed desire for God to be kind to everyone—even those who hate and afflict his people.

Our affections there are out of step with the Bible, I fear, for all we shouldn’t be flippant when discussing the issues. There’s lots to unpack, but I’d like to explore a particular side-alley which we probably miss when reading because we tend to pivot to apologetic questions.

The plagues are a tight literary unit, that is trying to express the mastery of Yahweh over the world and over the powers.

The first thing to note is that the plagues are in a pattern of 3 + 3 + 3 + 1. For the purposes of this blog post I’m going to look at the first nine, as the narrative has the last stand firmly on its own. Hopefully the last—what we now call the Passover—being separate is clear in the amount of time the text takes to describe it and the way the story unfolds. It takes two chapters for a start. The other nine follow an approximate pattern where each contains some sort of threat, plague, and interaction with Pharaoh, though not all in the same way.

How do we know they’re in a pattern of 3 + 3 + 3?

In plagues 3, 6, and 9, no request or threat is made to Pharaoh before the plague happens, instead God just tells Moses to go about causing the plague to fall. This literary feature leads us to think of them bracketed in three sets.

Then we might notice that the first three plagues fall on all the people in Egypt, Hebrew and Egyptians alike, but plagues 4-9 avoid the land of Goshen where the Hebrews live. The tenth plague distinguishes too, but in a different way.

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