The chapter numbering realigns here. The Masoretic offset that ran through chapters 7 and 8 closes at the end of the last chapter; Hebrew and English Exodus 9 are the same 35 verses. From here the two number alike.

The fifth plague falls on the herds — and with them on the wealth, the transport, the plowing and the altars of Egypt at one stroke. Egypt’s cattle were also its gods: Hathor wore the cow’s horns, the Apis bull was worshiped as a living god at Memphis, and Khnum was ram-headed. The pestilence is called “very HEAVY” (kaved) — the same word this book keeps using for Pharaoh’s heart.

⚠ «All the livestock of Egypt died» — and yet livestock are struck again nine verses later, and the firstborn of the cattle die at the last plague. The difficulty is old and the answer is in verse 3: the threat is aimed at “your livestock THAT ARE IN THE FIELD.” Hebrew kol, “all,” regularly means all of a stated kind rather than every last one in existence — here, all that were out in the open. The animals penned or stalled survived, which is exactly why verse 19 can warn Pharaoh to bring the rest indoors.

The DIVISION sharpens. The verb is hiflah, to set apart — the same distinction drawn at the swarms (8:18), now stated in advance and verified by inspection: Pharaoh SENDS to check, and finds not one animal of Israel’s dead. He has proof in hand, from his own investigators, and it changes nothing. KJV “shall sever”; the ESV “will make a distinction.”

The sixth plague is thrown, not spoken. Moses takes soot from a kiln and flings it skyward in front of the court, and it comes down as fine dust on the whole land: boils breaking out in blisters on man and beast. KJV “a boil breaking forth with blains”; the ESV “boils breaking out in sores.” Egypt had gods for this too — Sekhmet, the lion-headed mistress of plague, and Imhotep, the healer — and neither answers.

⚠ The professionals are finished. At the gnats the magicians could not duplicate; here they cannot even stand. The men whose whole office was to stand before Pharaoh are driven from the room by sores they cannot cure on their own bodies. They are never heard from again.

⚠ And now the sentence that changes hands. Read the hardening notices in order and something happens at this exact verse. Through the first five plagues the narrator says either that Pharaoh’s heart “was heavy” or “was strong” — a description with no subject — or that Pharaoh himself made it heavy (8:11, 8:28). Here, for the first time in the narration of events, Jehovah is the grammatical subject: “And JEHOVAH made strong the heart of Pharaoh.” It had been announced in advance (4:21; 7:3), but it is only now enacted, and only after the man has hardened himself five times over.

That order is the textual basis of the reading long called judicial hardening — that God confirms a man in the direction he has already chosen, so that the sentence is the sin repeated. It is a reading of the sequence, not a solution to it: the book still says both things and never reconciles them, and Paul will take the same material somewhere else entirely four verses from now. The library reports what the text does with the verbs and leaves the argument standing.

The seventh plague opens with the longest speech of the cycle, and its subject is not hail but Pharaoh himself — why he is still alive.

⚠ Verse 15 is a counterfactual, and versions split on it. The Hebrew can be read as a plain past (“I stretched out my hand…”) or, as most now take it, as what could have happened: by now I could have struck you with pestilence and you would have been wiped off the earth. KJV reads it as future — “For now I will stretch out my hand” — while the ESV and NIV read the potential past, “By now I could have…” The point either way is that the plagues have been restrained: five blows in, Egypt is still standing on purpose.

⚠ Verse 16, and the word Paul used. “For this very reason I have he’emadticha” — literally “made you stand,” which can mean raised you up (to a throne, for a purpose) or kept you standing (left you alive when you might have died). The Greek Old Testament chose “raised up,” and Paul quotes that Greek at Romans 9:17 as the hinge of his argument about God’s freedom. So the verse arrives in the New Testament through a translation that had already picked one of its two senses. KJV “have I raised thee up”; the ESV “I have let you live”; the NWT “I have kept you in existence.” Both senses point the same direction — “so that my NAME may be declared in all the earth” — but they are not the same claim, and it is worth knowing which one you are reading.

⚠ Then a warning, which is new. No previous plague came with instructions for surviving it. Here Pharaoh is told to bring men and animals in from the field, and the announcement runs a full day ahead: “about this time tomorrow.” The plague is announced in order to be escaped.

⚠ And some Egyptians BELIEVE. “The one who FEARED the word of Jehovah among the servants of Pharaoh” ran his people and his herds indoors; the one who “did not set his heart to the word” left them out. It is the first crack in Egypt: the line no longer runs simply between nations but through Pharaoh’s own household, drawn by whether a man takes the word seriously. These are plausibly the beginning of the “mixed multitude” that walks out with Israel at 12:38 — Egyptians who had learned to believe an announcement.

The storm itself is described as something unnatural: thunders, hail, and “fire flashing in the midst of the hail” — ice and fire in the same fall. KJV “fire mingled with the hail”; the ESV “fire flashing continually.” Egypt gets little rain; a hailstorm that shatters trees is not a bad season, it is an intrusion — and the sky was Nut’s, the air Shu’s, the storm Seth’s. Only Goshen is untouched.

⚠ «I have sinned THIS TIME.» Pharaoh’s first confession, and it is exact courtroom language: Jehovah is the RIGHTEOUS one (ha-tzaddiq), and I and my people are the WICKED (ha-resha’im) — the verdict a judge pronounces, said by the defendant about himself. But note the qualifier he attaches: this time. And note what he asks for — not forgiveness, only that the noise stop. His own word for God shifts too: he swears by “Jehovah” in verse 27 and asks relief from “the thunders of GOD” in verse 28, a phrase old translators read as a superlative for sheer violence (KJV “mighty thunderings”) and modern ones as plain “God’s thunder.”

Moses is not fooled, and says so: he will pray, and the hail will stop, “so that you may know that THE EARTH BELONGS TO JEHOVAH” — the claim widened from Egypt to the whole world — “but as for you and your servants, I know that you do not YET fear Jehovah God.” The prophet grants the confession and denies the repentance in the same breath, and verse 34 proves him right within the hour: the rain stops, and Pharaoh sins again and makes his heart heavy — he does, the verb back in his own hands.

⚠ Two verses of botany that quietly date the plague (vv31-32). The flax and barley were destroyed because the barley was “in the aviv” — in the ear, ripening — and the flax in bud; the wheat and spelt survived “for they are late.” In Egypt’s calendar that is roughly late January or early February: barley heads and flax flowers weeks before wheat. The detail is useless to a storyteller and decisive to a farmer, and it sets the clock running toward Passover in the month of Abib — a month named for that very word, the ripening ear. KJV “the barley was in the ear, and the flax was bolled,” and calls the spelt “rie”; the ESV and NIV read “spelt.”