Patriarchs and Prophets

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 of 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 Thebes became
chief god of Egypt during the eighteenth dynasty, the power of the sun-god Ra was
recognized as so great that a compromise was made by combining Amen and Ra to
make one god—Amen-Ra. A few years after the Exodus, when Ikhnaton introduced
a short-lived monotheism, the only god retained was Aton, the sun disk. Seeing how
entrenched sunworship was in the religious life of the Egyptians, and how highly
the sun god Ra, Amen-Ra, or Aton was revered, we can understand why the plague
directed against the God was brought upon Egypt toward the culmination of the fight
between the God of the Hebrews and His Egyptian adversaries.
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