Of Frogs and Hail

Egypt was the busiest pantheon of the ancient world. There was a god for the Nile and a god for the sun, a goddess with a frog's head for birth and a god with a jackal's head for death; gods for harvest, storm, fertility, writing, love and war. On top of that whole stack stood a man who took himself for a god: Pharaoh, son of the sun, the living Horus, the axis around which heaven and earth were said to turn. His word was law because his word was called divine. In that land, teeming with gods, a nation of slaves labored that had all but forgotten the Name of its own God. After four centuries of brick-kilns and whip-strokes, Israel barely knew anymore to whom it called.

Then an old shepherd came out of the desert, 80 years old, with a staff and a stammering tongue, and he brought a message no god of Egypt had ever heard: let My people go. The god-king laughed the laugh of one who has never known contradiction. Who is YHWH, that I should listen to Him? I do not know this god. It was, in its way, an honest question. And the whole rest of the story is the answer to it, an answer Egypt would feel shudder through its very foundations.

Persuasion was not God's purpose; He came to unmask Egypt. "On all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment," He said, and so it happened, god by god. The Nile, worshiped as a living deity, turned red and stank of blood; the source of all life became an open sewer. Out of that same water came the frogs, sacred to the goddess of birth, crawling ashore by the millions. The land was buried under its own holiness, with frogs in the beds, in the ovens, in the kneading troughs, until the sacred animal became a horror no one dared step over anymore. The sun, the highest of all, the very face of the king, went dark for three days into a darkness so thick you could feel it between your fingers; for three days the sun-god lay dead in his own sky. On the last night the divine heir to the throne fell, the son of the son of the sun, and with him the promise that Egypt's divinity would last forever. Plague after plague knocked a god from its pedestal, until the richest pantheon in the world lay in pieces on the ground.

Yet the turning point of this whole judgment comes with the most ridiculous plague, and it hangs on a single word. When the frogs had made life unbearable, the proud Pharaoh sent for the hated Moses and begged him, he who tolerated no power above himself, to pray to his God to take them away. Moses asked, almost courteously, when he should pray for him. Pharaoh could choose the hour himself. And Pharaoh (you read it, and you read it again, because it is too foolish to be true) Pharaoh said: tomorrow. One more night with the frogs in his bed, between his sheets, on his chest, as long as he did not have to concede that another was right. Very well, said Moses, it will be as you say, so that you may know there is no one like YHWH, our God.

Here the sentence that will carry everything is heard for the first time in all of Scripture: no one is like YHWH. No priest in white linen sings it in a sanctuary; it is spoken in a palace that reeks of rotting frogs, to a man who took himself for a god, about vermin. The God of heaven and earth proves His uniqueness with croaking amphibians and not with the stars, because He does not need to make Himself grand in order to be the greatest. The One who truly is everything can afford to begin with the smallest thing.

A few plagues later He repeats it, now in the first person, so that no doubt can remain about who will answer the question yet to come. Just before the hail, God has word sent to Pharaoh: this time I am sending all My plagues against your heart, so that you may know there is no one like Me in all the earth. Twice it sounds in Egypt, the second time from God's own mouth, and both times with the same purpose: so that you may know. The Hebrew verb, yada, reaches further than knowing facts; it means to know, to experience, to become intimate with, and it is the word Scripture uses when it says that Adam knew his wife Eve (Gen 4:1). God dismantles an empire because He wants to be known. The question this book follows was not invented by pious people who later attributed it to God. God Himself speaks it, in the land where He is least welcome, against the power that most fiercely denies He exists.

That word, tomorrow, sits on all our tongues. There is in every human being a king who would rather sleep one more night with the frogs than admit for one moment that he has it wrong; who prefers familiar misery to unfamiliar surrender; who postpones and postpones, because giving in feels like losing. You know your own frogs, the habit you cannot shake, the grudge you nurse, the image of yourself you dare not let go of. And you know the voice that says: tomorrow, tomorrow, not today yet. God waits out that tomorrow with a patience that is astonishing. But He leaves the question standing, against Pharaoh and against you. How long will you go on clinging to what is crushing you, while there is no one like Him?

He has Pharaoh told before the first plague falls: "Israel is My son, My firstborn. Let My son go, so that he may serve Me" (Exod 4:22–23). What follows is more than a lawsuit against gods. It is a Father coming to fetch His child, and the last plague strikes the firstborn son of the man who would not let His son go. Moses names the ground of it all 40 years later: not because this people was more numerous than others, for it was the fewest of all, "but because YHWH loved you" (Deut 7:7–8). The verb just before it is stronger still. YHWH had set His heart on them (chashaq): He attached Himself to them, He longed for them, with the word that also sounds when a man loses his heart to a woman. The God who wants to be known has lost His own heart.

See for whom He does all this: a heap of slaves who had lost His Name and who, the moment hunger came, would long again for the fleshpots of their slavery. They were not pious, nor were they worthy of Him. He fights for them even before they love Him. He proves Who He is to those who do not yet know Him. So this God is, from the very first page: He begins with those who have nothing and does not wait until someone deserves it, and that, if you dare to believe it, is the best news there is.

*A note on the source text. The plagues, following Exodus 7–12. "On all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment": Exodus 12:12; cf. Numbers 33:4. "So that you may know there is no one like YHWH, our God" (the frogs): Exodus 8:10; "so that you may know there is no one like Me in all the earth" (before the hail): Exodus 9:14. Yada as intimate knowing: Genesis 4:1; cf. Amos 3:2. "Israel is My son, My firstborn": Exodus 4:22–23; "because YHWH loved you" and chashaq: Deuteronomy 7:7–8; 10:15; for the human usage cf. Genesis 34:8; Deuteronomy 21:11, both in a fraught context. The dead frogs and the hardened heart: Exodus 8:13–15; "Today, if you hear His voice": Psalm 95:7–8; "as long as it is called today": Hebrews 3:13. The divine Name rendered as YHWH.*