The Plague of Blood
Introduction to Parashat Hashavua
Yeshivat Har Etzion
PARASHAT VAERA
The Plague of Blood
By Rav Michael Hattin
INTRODUCTION
Last
week's parasha concluded with the utter failure of Moshe and Aharon to win
He (Pharaoh) said: "you are slothful, exceedingly slothful, and therefore you are saying: let us go and offer sacrifice to God'! Now go and return to work, for straw shall not be supplied to you, but you shall meet the quota of bricks!" (5:17-18).
Gone
in an instant were
Moshe returned to God and he said: "Oh God, why have You brought evil upon this people, and why have You sent me? From the time that I have arrived before Pharaoh to speak in Your name, he has dealt wickedly with this people, and You have not saved your people at all!" (5:22-23).
THE PEDAGOGIC PLAGUES
But
God was impassive: "Now you will see what I shall do to Pharaoh, for with a
strong hand he shall send them forth, and with a strong hand he shall drive them
out of his land!" And emboldened by
that declaration, Moshe and Aharon returned to Pharaoh, not once or twice but
many times, as the plagues began to rain down upon
This
week, we will consider the first of the plagues, the blood that struck the river
God
said to Moshe: "Pharaoh's heart is hard, and he refuses to send forth the
people. Go to Pharaoh in the
morning, behold he goes out to the water, and you shall stand before him on the
banks of the
UNDERSTANDING
THE RIVER
The
It
is not at all surprising, therefore, that the
Since
rain does not fall in the
UNDERSTANDING THE BLOOD
While
Rashi addresses the fundamental question concerning WHY the river was struck at
the outset of the process, he does not elucidate the particular and grotesque
nature of the plague. According to
Rashi we do not know why the
Perhaps
the blood, then, was meant to serve the Egyptians as a striking reminder that
they had brought the disaster upon themselves by so enthusiastically shedding
the blood of the Israelite children whom they had heartlessly (but
surreptitiously?) cast into the Nile's murky depths in the Book's first
chapter. It was as if those depths
now disgorged that innocent blood and revealed the evil crime for all to see,
for elsewhere in the Tanakh we find that the theme of "blood exposed" indicates
the uncovering of a murderous felony that had been intentionally concealed by
the perpetrator (see Bereishit 4:9-10; 9:4-7; BeMidbar 35:3-34; etc.). God's power was thus matched by His
concern for justice, for unlike the gods of
THE DURATION OF THE PLAGUES
Unlike
most of the other plagues (except for darkness see Shemot 10:22-23), the Torah
states the duration for the plague of blood explicitly: "seven days elapsed
after God had stricken the
This
understanding of the plague narratives certainly tends to increase the time
element in the text, turning what might have otherwise been reasonably assumed
to have been a quick succession of hammer blows into a long and drawn-out
process. By elongating the temporal
dimension of the plagues substantially, the Rabbinic tradition has the effect of
implicitly supporting the earlier stated contention that their purpose was
primarily didactic and pedagogical, rather than punitive and retaliatory. After all, if God simply wanted to
punish Pharaoh and the Egyptians for their cruel indiscretions and to force
their compliance with His demands, then He could have rained down the plagues
upon
Thus, the Torah provides us with a rather startling pedagogic paradigm and casts the relevant narratives in an entirely different light. At the same time, we may now use this information to calculate the time of year that the plagues begin. After all, each plague lasted in total for a period of one month. The two exceptions were the plague of darkness the effects of which lasted for three days and not seven (10:21-23) and the striking of the firstborn that lasted but one terrifying night, for on the morrow the people ventured forth from Egyptian bondage into the glaring dawn of freedom (12:29-42). In other words, the ten plagues unfolded over the course of approximately nine whole months, for we may assume that the three-day plague of darkness was still followed by the three-week period of warning and admonition.
This
calculation is in rough correspondence with the variant tradition preserved in
Mishna Eduyot 2:10 in the name of Rabbi Akiva that the "period of judgment of
the Egyptians lasted for twelve months" if we take the beginning of that
judgment period to have commenced from the moment of Moshe's arrival in
THE TIMING OF THE PLAGUE OF BLOOD
In
any case, if the people of
The
If
the plague of blood struck during the month of June, then the effects of that
plague were all the more manifest and impressive. After all, here was the proud Pharaoh
and his devoted people eagerly anticipating the annual Inundation when Hapi the
river god would restore the
Remarkably,
Ibn Ezra (12th century,
The
text states that Moshe is to approach Pharaoh in the morning as he makes his way
to the river. The custom of the
king of
Thus
it was by this most forceful demonstration of His prowess that the God of the
Hebrews introduced Himself to Pharaoh and to the Egyptians and made the
re-acquaintance of His own people
Shabbat Shalom