Exodus 7
February 28, Year 1
[12] For each man cast down his staff, and they became serpents. But Aaron’s staff swallowed up their staffs.
As with the creation account in Genesis 1, the symbolism of the plagues is rich, having even many of the same correspondences to the created order.
As noted, Moses is the symbolic seed of a new world, saved in an “ark” from the “flood,” Pharaoh’s murderous plot to kill/drown the Israelite baby boys in the Nile.
The ten plagues have a similarly cosmic and multi-layered meaning:
Each plague pits the LORD against a “god” of the Egyptians, utterly defeating it. (I will not elaborate on all these correlations; the information is widely available online.)
As we will see, each plague deconstructs another layer of the Egyptian “cosmos”—destructively inverting the creation order—from the bottom up!
Each plague also has its own symbolic value.
Notice the satire in the wonders performed by Pharaoh’s magicians.
They cannot undo the chaos.
They can only increase it.
But less powerfully.
(A humbler Pharaoh might have responded, “Really, guys?! More water into blood?! Thank you. So much.”)
This is the symbolism of their staffs/serpents devoured by Aaron’s—chaos swallowed by greater chaos!
The Nile symbolizes…
the snake-god represented even on Pharaonic crowns. (See above.)
the land of Egypt geographically
“the sea”
Thus “the sea” is destroyed.
The Nile turned to blood symbolizes the murder of the baby boys.
