turning a staff into a serpent, especially when the unnamed King’s magicians
could do the same thing. Sort of underwhelming, but maybe YHWH needed
to warm up a bit first?
After each plague, usually the unnamed King sees the majesty of YHWH or
concedes to YHWH’s power, and agrees to let the Hebrews go, except that
his heart is then hardened (usually by YHWH) and he reneges on the
bargain, and the cycle continues. Now, why is YHWH doing this again and
again when supposedly all he wants is his chosen people released so they
can worship him? “Let my people go, so that they may worship me.”
(Exodus 10: 3-4) He says this repeatedly, so he is not doing this for the
Hebrew’s benefit from what we can see, and there is never an explanation
as to why they can’t worship him in Egypt. The reason is probably that
YHWH was then conceived as a regional godhead, and that is why he is
linked to Mount Gerizim, Mount Sinai and later to the Ark of the Covenant
and the Temple of Jerusalem. That is how gods were viewed in the
Canaanite and other regional religions, as local gods linked to places,
temples or idols. YHWH never claims to be the god over the Egyptians, just
to be stronger than the Egyptian’s gods.
Explanations for this “heart hardening” sort of “defeat-your-own-purpose”
mentality abound, as even a child can see the needless cruelty in someone
doing this sort of thing – making someone act explicitly in order to punish
them. It is almost the definition of sadism.
Some of the explanations, but by no means all, include the following. YHWH
is punishing the Egyptians for all the cruelty they inflicted on the Hebrews
during their years of slavery (this seems to be the most popular), so the
Egyptians “deserved it.” But although this is in YHWH’s tradition of punishing
innocent children and grandchildren for the commissions of the fathers, it’s
still pretty heinous. Then there is the “YHWH is proving his power”
argument. This argument says that YHWH is proving his power t