Frogs and Red Tide

June 22, 2009, 8:38 am by dc-agape.

Exodus Chapter 7:25-8:15

YHWH waits seven days after destroying the Nile, the food crops, and dehydrating the Egyptians and Israelites before telling Moses and Aaron to go to the Pharaoh again.  This time Moses and Aaron threaten the Pharaoh with a plague of frogs.  Since YHWH has hardened the Pharaoh’s heart, he ignores their threat. 

The next day frogs swarm out of the Nile.  They cover everything, including the cooking equipment and beds.  Even the NIV Study Bible recognizes that this would have occurred. The reason given is that without fish in the Nile, the food the frog relied on would multiply rapidly.  So this plague was actually not due to supernatural results.  The Study Bible goes further and indicates that the frogs may have died due to bacterial infects from the source of “Plague of Blood” a Red Tide phenomenon. 

The Pharaoh begs for the frogs to be taken away, but oddly he tells Moses and Aaron to wait a day.  Why would a leader of what is left of 3,000,000 people want to wait even an hour before the frogs are removed?  This whole event is looking more and more like Moses and Aaron taking advantage of a single phenomenon, the Red Tide and its results, to claim supernatural activity. 

Well the frogs do die, but they are not taken away as the Pharaoh as requested.  And remember the Israelites are also suffering from both the Nile turning to “blood” and from the now dead frogs.  The frogs are swept up into heaps, but the land reeked of their rotting corpses.  What happens to rotting animal corpses?  The next two plagues, that’s what!  But I will cover that in the next post.

The important thing here is that the Pharaoh’s heart is hardened as soon as the frogs die.  But this is not the Pharaoh’s fault:

Exodus 8:15 But when Pharaoh saw that there was relief, he hardened his heart and would not let listen to Moses and Aaron, just as the Lord had said.

YHWH did not just say that the Pharaoh would harden his heart, what he actually said was that YHWH, himself, would harden the Pharaoh’s heart:

Exodus 4:21 Then the Lord said to Moses, “When you return to Egypt, see that you perform before Pharaoh all the wonders I have given you the power to do.  But I will harden his heart so that he will not let the people go.

This is a two-fold action here.  First, YHWH has already planned to do all ten plagues!  Second, he has guaranteed that the Pharaoh’s heart will be hardened after each of the first nine plagues.  So this story has nothing to do with how evil the Pharaoh was, he was just a puppet in YHWH’s hands.  But more seriously, the entire events of these plagues could be linked.  Or at least all but two of the plagues could be.  The plague of hail may have been a lucky accident.  The plague of darkness is quite odd, but I will get to these plagues later.

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