Moses’ third objection. After “who am I?” (3:11) and “what is your name?” (3:13), Moses now says no one will believe him. God answers not with argument but with three signs (otot) — proofs to authenticate the messenger. The staff that becomes a serpent and back; the hand made leprous, white as snow, and healed; and water from the Nile turned to blood on the ground. Each will return: the staff-serpent will swallow the magicians’ snakes (ch 7), and the Nile-to-blood is the first plague in miniature. God gives Moses the plagues’ opening act to carry in his own hand.

Note the mercy in the order (v8): if they will not believe the first sign, then the second; if not the second, then the third. God stacks the evidence, patient with unbelief before it has even happened.

Moses’ fourth objection is his speech: “I am not a man of words… heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue” (kevad peh) — a stammer, a slowness, or simply the excuse of a reluctant man. God’s answer is one of the great sentences on providence and human limitation: “Who made man’s mouth? Or who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, Jehovah?” The God who made the mouth can use even a heavy one. KJV “I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue.”

The fifth and last objection is no longer an excuse but a plain refusal: “send by the hand of whomever you will send” — send someone else. And “Jehovah’s anger burned against Moses.” Yet even the anger is a concession: Aaron, already on his way, will be the mouth, and Moses will be “as God” to Aaron — the arrangement that becomes, at 7:1, “I have made you as God to Pharaoh, and Aaron your prophet.” The reluctant man is not replaced; he is given help. (Moses joins the line of the called who protest their inadequacy — and, like Jeremiah after him, “I am only a youth,” he is overruled by presence, not by argument.)

«All the men who sought your life are dead» (v19). The pharaoh Moses fled (2:15) has died. ⚠ On the early-date chronology this project foregrounds (the Exodus in 1446 BC, following Associates for Biblical Research / Joel Kramer), the pharaoh of the oppression was Thutmose III — Egypt’s great warrior-king — whose death (~1425 BC) is “the king of Egypt died” of 2:23; Moses now returns to his successor, Amenhotep II, the pharaoh of the Exodus. (The mainstream academic view dates the Exodus later, ~1250 BC under Ramesses II; the early date rests on 1 Kings 6:1’s “480 years” and is given here as the reading the project leads with, not a settled fact.)

Two things are announced before Moses reaches Egypt. First, “I will harden his heart” (v21) — the first of many statements that God will harden Pharaoh; the book will also say Pharaoh hardened his own heart, and the interplay of the two is one of Scripture’s hardest knots, left standing. Second, and staggering: “Israel is my firstborn son… let my son go, that he may serve me; if you refuse, I will kill your firstborn son” (vv22-23). Here, at the very outset, the tenth plague is already spoken. Israel is God’s bekhor — a claim of covenant sonship that reframes the whole conflict as a father reclaiming his son. And on the early date, the firstborn struck at Passover (12:29) is read alongside the Dream Stele of Thutmose IV, Amenhotep II’s successor, which reads as propaganda covering that he was NOT the expected heir — the crown prince, the firstborn, having died. KJV “Israel is my son, even my firstborn”; the ASV “Israel is my son, my first-born.”

⚠ One of the strangest and most obscure passages in the Torah — and honesty requires saying so plainly. On the way to Egypt, “Jehovah met him and sought to put him to death” — whom is not certain (Moses, most likely; possibly his son). Zipporah acts at once: she takes a flint, circumcises their son, touches the foreskin to “his feet,” and says, “Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me.” And the danger passes.

Nearly every word is disputed. The most common reading: Moses, about to demand that Pharaoh release God’s “son” and to warn of the firstborn, had left his OWN son uncircumcised — outside the covenant sign (Genesis 17) — and God will not send a covenant-breaker on a covenant errand; Zipporah’s emergency circumcision, and the blood she smears, sets it right, and foreshadows the blood on the doorposts that will save Israel’s firstborn (ch 12). ⚠ But the pronouns are slippery, “his feet” may be a euphemism, and “bridegroom of blood” (chatan damim) has no certain sense; the passage resists a confident solution, and this translation renders it closely and lets it stand strange. KJV “a bloody husband art thou to me.”

Aaron, sent by God, meets Moses “at the mountain of God” — the same Horeb where the bush burned — and kisses him; the two brothers, reunited after Moses’ forty years in Midian, go together to the elders. Aaron speaks the words and Moses does the signs, and the response is the very one the third objection feared would never come: “the people believed.”

And what they believe is not the wonders but what the wonders mean — “that Jehovah had VISITED the sons of Israel and had seen their affliction.” Paqad, the visitation verb, is the word Joseph swore by at the very end of Genesis: “God will surely visit you… and carry up my bones” (50:24). The promise made over Joseph’s coffin, four hundred years earlier, is now being kept. The people bow their heads and worship. The exodus has its messenger, its spokesman, and, at last, its people.