ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION NETWORK EXODUS DR. DAVID ADAMS #35 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> In talking about the plagues, somehow I just try to connect each one of the plagues with a particular god or goddess of ancient Egypt. But there seems to be disagreement about which gods were being attacked with which plague. How important is it for us to be able to identify which of the gods or goddesses is being attacked with each of the plagues? >> This is an interesting question. And it's one that comes up frequently in more conservative type commentaries. You almost never see this question dealt with in more historical critical types of commentaries. You're absolutely right, Nick, in suggesting that one of the points being made here and throughout the plague narratives is the conflict between Yahweh and the gods of Egypt. We've kind of said that along the way. It's not directly stated in any of the plague narratives. There's no direct statement that says here God is battling it out with the various gods of Egypt. But everybody recognizes that in the context of the ancient near east, that's how it would have been understood in Egypt at that time. And that's the way that we should understand it, as well. It's almost one of those things that's so obvious to any informed reader, that it doesn't need to be said directly in the text. But the question you ask about how, you know, we can identify which of the Egyptian gods is to be associated with which plague is a more difficult question. Some commentators spend a great deal of effort trying to identify which God Yahweh is defeating in each of the ten plagues. And frankly, none of these efforts have been very successful, at least not from my perspective. The reason is I think the Egyptians just have too many gods. And not only that, but it's often the case that the duties of the gods overlap so you won't just have one god responsible for one thing. You might have half a dozen different gods or goddesses responsible for something. So it's very difficult to say which god, you know, the text has in mind at any particular point. And frankly, it probably doesn't matter. Because the overall point is -- would have been clearly understood. That the gods of the Egyptians were in charge of all of these things, even if you didn't know which particular god was in charge of what. So collectively Yahweh is defeating them as a group. He's not really fighting them one by one in each of the ten plagues. He's demonstrating his power over all creation and, therefore, his power over all the false gods of Egypt. So it's really not all that important to be able to identify which god in particular is being addressed with which plague. The one that probably does stand out as the clearest is the plague that involves darkness. Because the -- there were three major sun gods in Egypt. There was Amun, there was Re and there was Aten. Two of them, at least Amun and Re, sometimes get combined into a single god called Amun Re. And Aten is sometimes associated with them and sometimes treated separately. But one way or another the sun god was the high god in the Egyptian pantheon. And because that god in particular is so easily identifiable and because that plague is the last one in the sequence before the death of the first born, it's probably the case that the ninth plague, the plague of darkness, sort of represents the culmination or the high point or the climax of the narratives before we get to the death of the first born. So that's probably the one plague out of the group where we could clearly identify more or less which Egyptian god is being addressed. What we have here as it would have been understood by the Egyptians at least is a kind of mythopoeic struggle being acted out: The struggle between Moses and Pharaoh in our world reflecting the struggle between Yahweh and the gods of Egypt in the realm of the divine. That's how the Egyptians would have understood it. And the main thing is that at every turn the gods of the Egyptians are defeated. And so that's the main point. Through this sequence of acts, Yahweh demonstrates that he is the only true God. And as a result, even the Egyptians will come to know that he is Yahweh as he indicated that he wanted them to do in Chapter 7 verse 5. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***