686
Patriarchs and Prophets
shalt not pervert the judgment of the stranger, nor of the fatherless;
nor take a widow’s raiment to pledge: But thou shalt remember that
thou wast a bondman in Egypt, and the Lord thy God redeemed thee
thence: Therefore I command thee to do this thing.”
[758]
Note 2. Page 272. That the plagues were designed to destroy
the confidence of the Egyptians in the power and protection of their
idols, and even made their gods to appear as cruel tormentors of their
worshipers, can be seen from a study of the Egyptian religion. A few
examples may serve to illustrate this fact
.
The first plague, turning the water of the river Nile and of all canals
into blood (
Exodus 7:19
), was directed against the source of Egypt’s
very existence. The river Nile was regarded with religious reverence,
and at several places sacrifices were offered to the Nile as to a god.
The second plague brought frogs over Egypt.
Exodus 8:6
. Frogs
were held sacred by the Egyptians, and one of their deities, Heqa, was
a frog-headed goddess thought to possess creative power. When the
frogs, as the result of Moses’ command, multiplied to the extent that
they filled the land from one end to the other, the Egyptians may have
wondered why Heqa was tormenting her ardent worshipers instead of
protecting them. In this way the Egyptians were not only punished by
the second plague, but witnessed also contempt heaped upon them,
as they supposed, by one of their gods (
Exodus 9:3
), of which many
represented powerful gods in the Egyptians pantheon. To mention
only a few, we find that the Apis bull was dedicated to Ptah, the father
of all the gods, the cow was sacred to Hathor, one of the most widely
worshiped of all female deities of the Nile country, while the ram
represented several gods like Khnemu, and the ram-headed Amen,
who was Egypt’s chief god in the New Empire period. Hence, the
disease which slew the animals dedicated to their deities revealed to
the Egyptians the impotence of their gods in the presence of the God
of the despised Hebrews.
The ninth plague (
Exodus 10:21
) dealt a heavy blow to one of the
greatest gods of Egypt, the sun god Ra, who had been continuously
worshiped from the earliest times of that country’s known history. In a
land which hardly ever saw clouds in the sky, the sun was recognized
as a never-failing power which provided warmth, light, life, and growth
to the whole world. Every Egyptian king considered himself as a “son
of Ra,” and carried this expression in his titulary. When Amen of