14 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Pharaoh's heart is hardened; he refuses to let the people go. 15 Go to Pharaoh in the morning, as he is going out to the water. Stand on the bank of the Nile to meet him, and take in your hand the staff that turned into a serpent. 16 And you shall say to him, ‘The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, sent me to you, saying, “Let my people go, that they may serve me in the wilderness.” But so far, you have not obeyed. 17 Thus says the Lord, “By this you shall know that I am the Lord: behold, with the staff that is in my hand I will strike the water that is in the Nile, and it shall turn into blood. 18 The fish in the Nile shall die, and the Nile will stink, and the Egyptians will grow weary of drinking water from the Nile.”’” 19 And the Lord said to Moses, “Say to Aaron, ‘Take your staff and stretch out your hand over the waters of Egypt, over their rivers, their canals, and their ponds, and all their pools of water, so that they may become blood, and there shall be blood throughout all the land of Egypt, even in vessels of wood and in vessels of stone.’”
Now here's an interesting and quite comical story -- almost Shakespearean in its bawdiness. What we have here is bathroom humor -- quite literally.
Pharaoh has gone out to the water; or, as one interpretation has it, he has gone out to make water. He's doing what all men do in the morning before they shave. This is the text's subversive way of telling the reader that Pharaoh is a man and only a man.
As Pharaoh is doing what he is doing, Moses and Aaron show up with Aaron's staff. Yes, the reader is meant to understand the staff with double entendre. What we have here is a showdown of manhood.
The Nile will be turned to blood by the power of Aaron's staff. But to Pharaoh it's nothing. This magicians can do the same. The Egyptians have been turning the Nile to blood for 40 years. This is how they control slave population -- by drowning the slave babies in the Nile. Pharaoh's heart is unmoved; he has seen blood before. The Egyptians' water has been polluted by the effects of Pharaoh's ideology for as long as anyone can remember. The blood in the Nile resulting from this showdown is a matter of degree, not substance. Environmental degradation is small price to pay for control. This too shall pass, Pharaoh thinks.
But Pharaoh's weakness has been exposed. He is a mortal and not God -- and certainly not the LORD God. And though Moses has yet to find his voice, he has shown his courage. For his name is Moses, meaning "drawn up out of the water". He was delivered from the bloody waters of the Nile once before; and he is beginning to believe the LORD was telling him the truth when he said all Israel will be delivered with him.
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