Exodus 7:14-18

FIRST PLAGUE BLOOD, Exodus 7:14-25.

15. Lo, he goeth out unto the water; and thou shalt stand by the river’s brink Some think that this was the time of the commencement of the annual rise of the river, because that the Nile then assumes a reddish hue produced by the mud of the upper country; but this annual redness of the river is an indication of palatability and wholesomeness . Yet, as all these plagues are found, as far as we understand them, to correspond remarkably with peculiarities of the country, being, as Hengstenberg has shown, specially fitted to the Egyptian geography, climate, soil, vegetable and animal life, it is possible that the very peculiarity of the miracle lay in the fact that the reddish hue, which is usually a sign of wholesomeness in the Nile, then deepened to a bloody tinge, which was the token of loathsomeness and death. The water which is usually drank with such avidity became nauseous and poisonous. If this be so, then the time of the infliction is fixed at about the middle of June. Yet this must be taken as supposition only, the first sure note of time occurring in the account of the hail, (Exodus 9:31-32,) which destroyed the barley in the ear and the flax in blossom, which in Egypt must have been in February . The tenth plague occurred about the middle of April . Now the Nile begins to regularly rise in Lower Egypt, which is the scene of this history, about the summer solstice, or toward the end of June; about the end of August it begins to pour through the canals and fall over the valley in sheets of water, and the inundation then properly commences; toward the end of September it reaches its height, and then sinks to its lowest point at about the Vernal Equinox, or the last of March . If now the first of the plagues took place in the middle of June, it will be seen that the ten ran through the whole Nile period, thus cursing every several part of the Egyptian year. This is the view of Hengstenberg in his Egypt and the Books of Moses.

Probably Pharaoh went forth in the morning to worship, since the Nile was regarded as the embodiment of the god Osiris, of whom the bull Apis was considered the living emblem. On the monuments we find it called the “god Nile,” the “Father of the gods,” the “life-giving Father of all things.” At Nilopolis (Nile-city) there was a temple and an order of priests for the worship of the river. Thus was Pharaoh’s god smitten to death before his eyes as he offered him his morning prayer.