Exodus 1
February 21, Year 1
[22] Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, “Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live.”
Pharaoh here commands “all his people” to throw the male babies into the Nile, thereby making himself, and all who obey him, enemies of the LORD. (See Genesis 12:3.)
In Genesis, the Nile was mentioned only as the place in his dream where Joseph’s Pharaoh sees cows.
Now it becomes the symbol of a serpent swallowing Israel.1
We have seen often the symbolism of Egypt as a netherworld.
In the Bible, the sea has the same connotations as Sheol. (See Revelation 20:13.)
The Nile is also considered to be “the sea.” (See Isaiah 19:5; Nahum 3:8, Ezekiel 32:2.)
It flows into the ocean.2
All rivers are serpentine in shape.
The Egyptians revere the snake god, inseparable from the Nile, as we will see better a bit later in the story.
The reptile crocodiles of the Nile are categorically the same as snakes, dragons, sea monsters, etc. in the ancient imagination.
Notice the coil of the tail in the image above, an artistic convention common to all these, especially in medieval iconography. (“Leviathan” is derived from the same root in Hebrew as “coil” or “fold.”)
As ruler of this netherworld, that makes Pharaoh a satanic figure. (See especially Ezekiel 32:2.)
“And when the dragon saw that he had been thrown down to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child…. The serpent poured water like a river out of his mouth after the woman, to sweep her away with a flood.” (Revelation 12:13-15)
See the map above.