Sermon Tone Analysis

Commentary:

7:1- “God tells Moses, “See, I have made you God to Pharaoh” (Ex.

7:1 AT),⁷ which of course does not mean that God thinks Moses has become indifferentiable from God himself.

The point is that Moses’s ruling authority in the relevant matters is the ruling authority of God. . . .

Both the NIV and the ESV render the Hebrew, “See, I have made you like God to Pharaoh.”

In fact, every major modern English translation opts for “like God,” “as God,” or “seem like God,” all of which renderings are, contextually speaking, semantically accurate and happily orthodox, but entirely lacking in the rhetorical punch of the original.”

-DA Carson, Jesus the Son of God Thus begins a handful of instances where Moses is equated with God as he speaks with the authority of a god.

So far, Moses is the closest we've come to the human capable of redeeming humanity, uniting God and humans, but even Moses falls short.

Imagine how significant the implications of this verse would be to a man who saw himself as a god or at least the son of a god.

Moses had to be a god to talk authoritatively to a god.

“The highest level that any human being can achieve in Israelite religion is prophet, one who receives direct communications from God. Beneath this rank is the rank of priest, one who receives communications through the more indirect method of Urim and Thummim.

In other ancient Near Eastern cultures, ordinary human beings can achieve the level of the divine in very special cases.

The best known example from Egypt is the great sage Imhotep, who was deified by later generations; and the best known example from Mesopotamia is the legendary hero Gilgamesh.

Parallel cases from Greece include Herakles and Prometheus.

In Israel the elevation of a human being from human status to divine status certainly was heretical.

For while the covenant concept in ancient Israel meant that the relationship between man and God was extremely close, the gap between the two could never be bridged.

Paradoxically, the other cultures in the ancient Near East viewed their gods as distant. . .

and yet the larger gap could be bridged.

The standard theology of the Bible, however, is set aside in the case of Moses’s appearance before Pharaoh.

The summit conference between the two leaders of the two peoples demands that the two appear as equals.

Accordingly, since Pharaoh was understood to be a god by his people, for the purposes of this story, Moses is elevated to divine status.

This is the plain meaning of the two passages cited at the outset.

When one country sends a foreign minister, the other follows suit; and so on.

If this were simply a case of Aaron serving as a spokesperson for his brother Moses encumbered by a speech impediment or with difficulties speaking, as some scholars have suggested, then one would be ready to accept the words “mouth” and “prophet” figuratively, with no further discussion necessary.

But the application of the term elohim to Moses in these passages informs us that something much grander is present, namely, promotion to divine status, and thus one needs to understand the epithets attributed to Aaron literally: they notify the reader that he too has been elevated in rank, to the level of prophet..” 1 ‌

7:2- Funny thing how Aaron is supposed to be the mouthpiece, but we don’t see much of him speaking on Moses’ behalf.

There are a few passages that say he and Moses did something together, but we don’t have a single word recorded from Aaron until the Golden Calf in Ex 32.

‌7:3- If God already says He will harden Pharaoh’s heart before the first plague (and even before Moses reenters Pharaoh’s court, Ex 4:21 and 3:19), does that mean that God was removing Pharaoh’s free will.

If so, wouldn’t that make God responsible for Pharaoh's actions?

I encourage you to study this out for yourself without jumping to any overly easy blanket answers (ie God’s ways are different from ours, God can do whatever he wants, or God can’t do anything wrong).

There is no easy answer to the balance between sovereignty and free will.

That being said, I do believe there is a way we can read these passages and preserve both truths in balance without having God force anyone to do anything they wouldn’t otherwise do.

Several verses between Ex 3 and Ex 11 talk about Pharaoh's heart being hard.

Some say God hardened it.

Others say Pharoah hardened it.

The word most often used of God’s action actually means to strengthen or to give extra courage to.

It doesn’t mean to harden in the sense we normally read into it.

In fact, the word is used nearly 300 times in the Tanakh, and only 13 times is it translated as “hardened,” with 12 of those times being in these chapters about Pharaoh.

The remaining instance is almost identical, just about the inhabitants of Canaan in Joshua rather than Pharaoh.

In other words, Yahweh was not hardening Pharaoh’s heart in the sense of encouraging him to make the wrong decision.

Yahweh knew the difficult decision that lay ahead for Pharaoh, so He strengthened Pharaoh’s heart.

He gave him extra courage in the hopes that Pharaoh would use that for good.

Instead, Pharaoh chose a way that brought more death.

He thought it’d bring more death for Israel, but it actually brought more death for Egypt.

It’s also important to notice that this is a narrative about how God dealt with one specific really bad guy a really long time ago.

It is not a systematic theology textbook, stating how He works with people in general.

The Bible is not suggesting that God would ever harden your heart against Him.

God is not going to force you to do something you don’t want to do.

Notice that while we frequently refer to the 10 Plagues, the author called them “signs” more than he called them plagues.

Only the hail and death of the firstborn were called “plagues.”

As I understand it, and I do have to do more study, a sign has the idea of a portent of the future while a wonder has the idea of something miraculous, something supernatural.

‌7:4- We wouldn’t think of a bunch of slaves as an army, but in the hands of God, anyone can become anything.

A single person can become an army.

Remember that the next time you feel incapable or unqualified in life.

Notice that these signs are not punishments.

They’re judgments in the sense that Yahweh looked down and judged that this is the kind of life Pharaoh chose for his people.

God doesn’t punish nearly as much as He just lets you receive the consequences of your own actions.‌

7:5- Five times in Exodus God says His purpose for the 10 Signs is for the Israelites to know that He is God.

Another five times, He says His purpose is for the Egyptians to know that He is God.

The goal of the exodus wasn’t just freedom.

It was also recognition.

He created all people and then chose a specific family in Genesis.

This is the start of His drawing all people to Himself.

He is showing that He actually cares about the poor and oppressed and wants to reunite all people into an Eden-like state.‌

7:7- “At the moment when Moses and Aaron are ready to appear before Pharaoh, the text stops to inform us of the ages of the two heroes.

Moses, we learn, is 80 years old at this point (Exodus 7:7).

No doubt there is an attempt here at an internally consistent chronology, since the wandering period lasts 40 years and Moses dies at the age of 120.

But the very fact that Moses’s age of 80 years is noted immediately before his appearance before Pharaoh is significant, I believe, in light of the following.

One of the classic texts that relates the struggle between Horus and Seth is the Late Egyptian story called ‘The Contendings of Horus and Seth. .

.’ dated to the 20th Dynasty.

In the course of the story, Thoth writes a letter to Re-Atum in which he states ‘What shall we do about these two people, who for eighty years now have been before the tribunal, and no one knows how to judge between the two?’

As I remarked above, the Moses birth story places Moses in the traditional role of Horus, and it transforms Pharaoh into the traditional role of Seth.

As the Exodus narrative progresses from the birth account to the initial appearance of Moses before Pharaoh, 80 years have passed.” 2

7:9- Miracle is that word “wonder” from verse 3. It’s a sign.

Remember how Moses’ rod previously turned into a nachash, a serpent like the one from the Garden?

Ready for that to get even funkier?

This is not the nachash word of the earlier passage.

This is the word tannin, a sea monster, the leviathan from Job, the symbol of chaos revered by so many ancient cultures.

Why would the sign change from a dragon creature to a sea serpent creature?

I propose it is because control over the nachash would have been significant to Israel due to her origin story (the Garden) but meaningless to the Egyptians who didn’t share that creation narrative.

But for Yahweh to control a chaos monster, a tannin, and then use it to destroy other tanninim, that would stand out to the Egyptians as significant.

‌7:11- As we’ve discussed in the introduction to this class, while we believe that Yahweh is the true God, there are other elohim, other powerful spiritual beings that exist for real in the spiritual realm.

The Bible presents them as realities that can cross dimensions and share their power with humans.

We’ve sterilized all that because it’s uncomfortable, but I don’t want to be guilty of taming our sacred Scriptures.

I don’t think God looks pleasantly on those who do.

The Bible presents people like these sorcerers as legitimate sorcerers, devotees of a pagan god who through some form of black magic, attained otherworldly power.

The text doesn’t explain how because ancient people weren’t as stubborn as we are about explaining away this stuff.

They just knew it was real.

Pharaoh summons wise men (advisors with a particular set of skills), sorcerers (wizards, people who had some connection to the spiritual realm), and magicians (a specific type of priest who possessed occult knowledge; astrologers).

They were not slight of hand artists like we think of.

Check out https://www.thetorah.com/article/the-egyptian-magicians

for some pictures of what these sorcerer priests may have looked like.

Interestingly enough, magicians show up one time in the Bible before this story.

And in that story, they’re also alongside Egyptian wise men (Genesis 41:8 when the Pharaoh at the time of Joseph has a vision he doesn’t understand).

Want to guess the next time wise men, sorcerers, and magicians all show up together in the Biblical story?

It’s Daniel 2:2.‌ Gen 41:8 and Ex 7:11 are connected by their both taking place in Egypt.

Gen 41:8 and Dan 2:2 are connected by both being about unsolvable mystery dreams a powerful world leader had.

That’s Biblical theology.

You might not have connected Joseph’s Pharoah with Moses’ Pharoah with Nebuchadnezzar, but the Bible does, and it’s really cool.

Random side note just for fun, Jewish tradition puts an emphasis on just two of the magicians and suggests they are “sons of Balaam and places their rise at the time the Pharaoh gave command to kill the first-born of Israel and supposes them to have been teachers of Moses, the makers of the golden calf.”