«I have made you God to Pharaoh, and Aaron your brother shall be your prophet.» The arrangement of 4:16 — Moses “as God” to Aaron — is now aimed at the throne. And in doing so the verse hands us the Bible’s clearest working definition of a prophet (navi): not primarily a predictor but a MOUTH — the one who says another’s words. Aaron will be to Moses exactly what a prophet is to God. KJV “I have made thee a god to Pharaoh.”

⚠ The hardening, and its purpose. “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart… and the Egyptians shall KNOW that I am Jehovah” (vv3, 5). That second clause is the direct answer to Pharaoh’s sneer two chapters ago — “I do not know Jehovah” (5:2). Egypt is going to learn the Name, and learn it the hard way; the plagues are not merely punishments but a revelation aimed at a man who said the God of the Hebrews was not on his lists.

Two old men. Moses is eighty and Aaron eighty-three when they walk into that court (v7). The deliverance of a nation begins with a pair of octogenarians — and Moses’ life divides into three forties: forty years in Egypt, forty in Midian, forty in the wilderness ahead.

⚠ Watch the word change. In chapter 4 the staff became a NACHASH, a snake. Here, before Pharaoh, it becomes a TANNIN — a bigger word: serpent, dragon, sea-monster, the same term as the great sea creatures of Genesis 1:21. The escalation is deliberate, and it is pointedly Egyptian: the cobra (the uraeus) reared on Pharaoh’s crown as the very emblem of his power, and Ezekiel will one day call Pharaoh himself “the great TANNIN lying in the midst of his rivers” (29:3). Aaron’s staff swallowing theirs is not a conjuring trick; it is the whole book in one image.

The magicians did the same. The chartummim matched the sign “with their secret arts,” and ⚠ the text does not explain how. The honest reading resists both easy exits: Scripture neither exposes them as frauds nor credits them with power of their own. It simply reports the outcome — whatever they managed, it was swallowed. KJV “with their enchantments.”

The first plague strikes the Nile — and in Egypt that is not merely a river. The Nile WAS Egypt: its flood laid down the soil, its water was the life of the whole kingdom, and it was itself divine — HAPI, god of the inundation, was worshiped as the giver of all abundance, and the river was bound up with Osiris besides. ⚠ The plagues are consistently aimed at Egypt’s gods — Exodus says so outright at 12:12, “against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments” — and this is the opening shot: the god of the Nile turned to blood and made to stink.

⚠ And a grimmer justice runs underneath it. This is the river into which Pharaoh commanded that every Hebrew boy be thrown (1:22). The water that swallowed Israel’s sons now runs with blood, in front of the king who gave the order. The text never says it; it simply strikes that river first.

⚠ Two different heart-verbs. Verse 14 says Pharaoh’s heart is kaved — HEAVY, weighed down — while verses 13 and 22 use chazaq, STRONG, unyielding. (A third, qashah, “stubborn,” joins them later.) Most English versions flatten all of them to “hardened,” which loses the fact that Exodus is describing the same refusal from several angles — a heart heavy as a stone, a heart braced like a wall. KJV “Pharaoh’s heart is hardened” for both; the ESV distinguishes them, reading “Pharaoh’s heart is hardened” here but “heavy” in its notes.

«By this you shall KNOW that I am Jehovah» (v17) — the refrain begins here and will toll through all ten plagues.

The magicians match it again (v22), which — as readers have long noticed — only makes matters worse: their skill can ADD blood; it cannot take any away. And Pharaoh “did not set his heart even to this” but turned and went home, while all Egypt dug holes beside the river looking for water. Seven days.

⚠ A versification note. In the Hebrew Masoretic text, chapter 7 runs to 29 verses and closes with the announcement of the second plague. Most English Bibles end chapter 7 at verse 25 and print these four verses as 8:1-4. This translation follows the Masoretic numbering throughout, so Hebrew 7:26-29 = English 8:1-4. Nothing is missing and nothing is added; the chapter division simply falls in a different place. The KJV, like nearly every English Bible, prints these four verses as 8:1-4. (The same kind of offset appears elsewhere — Genesis 32, for instance, where the Hebrew runs a verse ahead of the English.)

The threat itself is domestic, comic, and horrifying at once: frogs in the house, in the bedroom, ON THE BED, in the servants’ quarters, in the ovens and the kneading bowls. Nowhere to step, nothing to eat that has not been crawled over. And the target is a god again: Heqet, the frog-headed goddess of birth and fertility, whose sacred creature becomes unbearable by sheer multiplication. The second plague does not import a foreign horror into Egypt; it takes something Egypt called holy and gives them far too much of it.