What is it with Pharaoh’s obstinacy as his land and people in it are being destroyed? It’s been the content of the mid-week meeting for two weeks running. Frogs, gadflies, boils, locusts, hail, darkness, etc. He just gets more stubborn! I mean, you can admire a guy for sticking to his guns, but there is also such a thing as taking a hint!
Maybe the way to look at this is when a city roots for its lousy football team. Not all teams are good. Some are lousy. And they have been that way for a long, long time. Yet, even as they play and get shellacked as usual, as they always get shellacked, there are true-blu fans who root for them! They will not throw in the towel!
Now, we know enough about ancient Egypt and the 10 plagues to know that it was a contest of the gods. People don’t matter when the reputation of the gods is at stake. Those ten plagues: water to blood, frogs, gnats, gadflies, plague, boils, hail, locusts, darkness—Egypt had a god for every one of those categories, charged to keep disaster at bay. The Hebrew God pummeled every one of them, play after play! Yet, Pharaoh is rooting for his team of losers!
‘What’s wrong with you? Do you have a screw loose?!’ the servants say to Pharaoh, but not too forcefully because he is Pharaoh, after all. (Exodus 10:7) He did and he didn’t. He was rooting for his team. Too bad for the people, but they didn’t count. Maybe it’s even their fault. Had they been cheering for their gods a little more, or serving them a little more dutifully, maybe those gods would not be having their butts kicked so decisively! Meanwhile, Pharaoh keeps himself relatively isolated from harm in his pharoah-castle. Sorry, but “critical thinking” was not a thing back then.
Is it today? We live in a time where people loudly proclaim their critical thinking skills, yet come to polar opposite conclusions on the facts laid before them. Surely, one can see Allan Guelzo’s concern that critical thinking may not only not improve his field of historical research, but may even make it worse, by “cloaking human bias in a veneer of science.” The trouble with critical thinking is that those who most openly espouse it frequently claim a monopoly on the stuff.
It was not until Pharaoh’s own quarterback was taken out that he relented. And even then, it was temporary. He reneged, whereas it would have been better for him had he not.
When the Israelites pulled out of Egypt, not so much as a dog barked: “But not even a dog will bark at the Israelites, at the men or their livestock, so that you may know that Jehovah can make a distinction between the Egyptians and the Israelites.” (11:7) They were all glad to see them go; Pharaoh having been the last holdout.
This verse resonated with me because I’d been out in service with Ken that day and I finally found a car in front of the house that I must have tried a half-dozen times over the years, but never with anyone at home, junk spewed all over the yard as usual. Dogs were there, all right, securely behind the stolid barrier, and did they ever raise a ruckus! Big grey demon-like dogs, four of them, identical, as though the kind guarding mythological the gates of hell. ‘Let’s just stand here a moment,’ I said to Ken. ‘See if anyone shows.’ He did, but when he understood our purpose, he waved us away.
This has nothing to do with Pharaoh or the Egyptians, but they sure were surly dogs, of a breed I could not determine.
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