“Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Pharaoh’s heart is hard: He refuses to let the people go. Go to Pharaoh in the morning. When you see him walking out to the water, stand ready to meet him by the bank of the Nile. Take in your hand the staff that turned into a snake. Tell him: The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, has sent me to tell you: Let my people go, so that they may worship me in the wilderness. But so far you have not listened. This is what the Lord says: Here is how you will know that I am the Lord. Watch. I am about to strike the water in the Nile with the staff in my hand, and it will turn to blood.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

At last we come to the place the action really gets going. Moses and Aaron finally go to confront Pharaoh directly about his refusal to let the people of Israel go. This begins a series of actions God uses to convince him to do it. Exactly how these played out is something that has puzzled scholars and interpreters for centuries, but especially in the modern world. We’ll take some time working through each of these, starting here where all the waters in Egypt…except for some of them…were turned to blood. How did this work? Let’s talk about it.

There’s a scene from the second Ghostbusters movie when Sigourney Weaver’s character is drawing a bath for her baby, Oscar, who the evil spirit in the painting she is restoring wants to use to resurrect himself so he can conquer the world. As she turns on the water, initially water comes out like normal. But then the water sputters a bit and stops. The music takes an ominous turn, and suddenly the evil ectoplasm starts pouring out and begins reaching out to take Oscar from her. The scene looks really silly now, but watching it for the first time when I was under the age of ten, it was terrifying.

Imagine the shock and terror of the Egyptian people when suddenly all of the water in the land turned to blood. None of them knew about the spiritual and political conflict brewing between Pharaoh and the God of the Hebrews. Most of them had probably at least heard about the Hebrew people, but not to such a degree that they really knew their plight. Even if they had, though, they wouldn’t have cared. The Hebrews were a conquered people, so of course they were serving as slaves. Like everyone else in the world then – including the Hebrews themselves – they didn’t have a mental or moral category for slavery’s being wrong. All they knew is that when they went out to get water that morning, it was all blood.

Pharaoh had refused to honor God’s request on His first two tries. His pride and stubbornness ran far deeper than a polite request and what he considered a mere parlor trick were going to be able to undo. So, it was time to rank up the volume on the request a bit. Moses and Aaron meet Pharaoh on the bank of the Nile River one morning as he went out with his entourage to do whatever he was going to do there. We’re not sure what it was, but that doesn’t matter. Moses met him, and using Aaron as his mouthpiece, said that since he wouldn’t let the people go to worship in the wilderness, God was going to prove to him that He really was a greater and stronger God than Pharaoh thought himself to be by turning the waters of the Nile to blood. (By the way, going forward, I will join the text in saying Moses said this or that, but keep in mind that Aaron was always the one speaking and performing the various physical actions of the plagues.)

I only included a bit of the story here. I’ll do the same for the rest of the stories of the plagues. You would do well to read the whole thing through v. 24. Let’s talk through what’s happening here.

First and foremost, did the Nile really turn to blood? In other words, was this a supernatural phenomenon or a conveniently timed natural one? Many modern interpretations of the plagues have sought to find natural explanations for all of them, while I get this impulse – we want to be able to explain things in a way we can understand and control – I think it is the wrong impulse here. I think it is the wrong impulse for all of the plagues. These were miraculous displays of God’s power. If they were anything other than that, they would not have convinced Pharaoh to act. I believe this was a display of God’s power and that the waters turned into literal blood. This wasn’t just disturbed sediment in the water. That doesn’t fit with the description that “all the water in the Nile was turned to blood.” Moses later goes on to note that nearly all the waters in Egypt became blood. Not like blood, but blood. Even waters taken from the Nile, but which were stored away from it in wooden or stone containers became blood. There is simply no explanation for that other than that the text means what it says.

Working a bit against this idea, however, is the fact that after Moses turns all the water in Egypt to blood, Pharaoh’s magicians were able to reproduce the effect like they had been able to do with the staff that turned into a snake. If this was really something truly miraculous, how was it that they were able to do the same thing? Well, it could be that Pharaoh’s magicians did have some sort of real occult powers. I honestly want for that option to be far more dubious. I want to say that it is far more likely that they used a trick like they had done with the staff-to-snake last time. That being said, it is a fair question to wonder why the text simply says they were able to do “the same thing by their occult practices.” Why doubt the reliability of that report, but not the one about what God did? So, it really could be that God allowed them to exercise some sort of mystical powers here. They had achieved these in some form or fashion before and God didn’t prevent their being used here. This is one of those places where I think we have to wave the mystery flag.

Another important thing to note here is that this and all of the plagues were not just God randomly picking things that would make the lives of the Egyptians miserable in hopes that if He harassed them long enough and hard enough, they would eventually prevail in pressuring Pharaoh to let the Israelites go for the sake of ending their misery. Each individual plague – including this one – was about demonstrating God’s power over and against a god in the Egyptian pantheon. In this case, the Nile was deified by the people as one of their major sources of life and sustenance. Nearly all the food they ate was connected to the Nile in some form or fashion By turning the waters of the Nile to blood, God was cutting the Egyptian people off from life. This god who provided for them was nothing before the God of the Hebrews. He could take what was a source of life and turn it into a source of death. The message should have been clear: I am more powerful than your powerful gods.

And yet, in spite of the horror of this act of judgment, God was still merciful in it. His mercy-in-judgment shows in several ways. Number one, the plague only lasted for seven days. This was probably a literal seven days, but more than that, it symbolized a complete amount of time. The plague was restrained from the start. The plague didn’t come at a time when crops were in particular need of water, so while it did strike a major source of their food – all the fish in the Nile died, which would have been a collateral impact of the plague that would have been pretty bad in itself – it did not wipe out their food source altogether. More than this, though, the people were still able to get potable water by digging holes around the Nile. Had they been completely cut off from water for seven days, many would have died. God didn’t want that.

While this plague was intended to be a wakeup call – and it surely was for the people of Egypt – it seems to have not even phased Pharaoh. As soon as he saw his magicians reproduce the effect, Moses tells us that he “turned around, went into his palace, and didn’t take even this to heart.” God was trying to get his attention, and he wouldn’t give it. There’s the reminder for us here. When God tries to get our attention, we’re best to give it to Him. We’re best to give it because we’re probably not going to like it if He has to turn up the volume a bit. As we will see in the coming days, Lord willing, the Egyptian people certainly didn’t like it when God turned up the volume on Pharaoh. When God calls, answer Him. You don’t want to miss what He has to say.