Exodus 7 opens the plagues narrative — the long pedagogical answer to Pharaoh’s 5:2 question, “Who is the LORD?” The chapter has three movements: the commissioning charge and the rod-to-serpent sign before Pharaoh (7:1-13), the first plague’s announcement (7:14-19), and the plague’s execution and aftermath (7:20-25).
The commissioning charge (7:1-7). The LORD answers Moses’ renewed “uncircumcised lips” objection of Exodus 6 with an arrangement: “See, I have made thee a god to Pharaoh: and Aaron thy brother shall be thy prophet.” Moses stands to Pharaoh as a divine voice; Aaron stands to Moses as a prophetic mouthpiece. The chapter then announces the structure of what is to follow. The LORD will harden Pharaoh’s heart (the verb here is qashah ) and “multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt.” The purpose is then made unmistakable: “the Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD, when I stretch forth mine hand upon Egypt, and bring out the children of Israel from among them.” The 5:2 question (“Who is the LORD?”) receives the chapter’s structural answer in advance: by the end, the Egyptians shall know.
The chapter then pauses for a single biographical note that the OT uses sparingly and with weight: “Moses was fourscore years old, and Aaron fourscore and three years old, when they spake unto Pharaoh.” The Exodus is launched by an octogenarian and his elder brother.
The rod-to-serpent sign (7:8-13). The opening sign is a public re-staging of Exodus 4’s private rod-to-serpent demonstration — but with a deliberate vocabulary shift. In Exod 4:3, the rod becomes a nachash (serpent, the same word as Eden’s serpent). In Exod 7:9-12, the rod becomes a tannin (dragon / sea-monster) — the word elsewhere used for the sea creatures of Gen 1:21 and for the Nile-monster image Ezekiel will later apply to Pharaoh himself. The shift in vocabulary raises the sign from a sleight-of-hand demonstration to a cosmological confrontation. The LORD’s instrument in Aaron’s hand is the chaos-serpent the LORD masters.
Pharaoh calls “the wise men and the sorcerers” and the magicians of Egypt; they replicate the sign with their enchantments : every man casts down his rod, and the rods become serpents — but Aaron’s rod swallows up theirs. The chapter’s first sign-contest resolves at once in the LORD’s favor. Pharaoh’s heart is hardened (“he hardened” — passive, the chapter not naming the agent for the first hardening, which standard commentaries treat as deliberate); he does not hearken; “as the LORD had said.”
The first plague: water to blood (7:14-25). The LORD’s instruction comes the next morning at the river’s brink: catch Pharaoh as he goes out to the water; deliver the demand; perform the sign. The demand is again Exodus’s standing refrain — “Let my people go, that they may serve me in the wilderness.” The sign is a new application of the rod: smite the river, and the waters become blood. The LORD’s stated purpose is again the recognition-formula: “In this thou shalt know that I am the LORD.”
The execution is total. Aaron’s rod, lifted under Moses’ command, is stretched over the Nile and over all the waters of Egypt — streams, rivers, ponds, pools, and even the water already drawn into vessels of wood and stone. The fish die; the river stinks; the Egyptians cannot drink and dig along the banks for groundwater. The chapter records the seven-day duration of the affliction in a single closing verse (7:25).
The first plague’s target is announced by its object. The Nile was the agricultural lifeline of Egypt and the object of Egyptian religious cosmology — the inundation deified as Hapy, the river itself as a divine giver. The LORD’s first stroke turns the giver against the receivers. The polemical pattern the LORD will later name explicitly — “against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment” (Exodus 12:12↗) — opens here against the most central of Egypt’s gods.
The magicians replicate the sign with their enchantments on a small scale (the text does not explain how, given that all the water was already blood — standard commentaries note the textual difficulty; one reading is that the magicians used some of the groundwater the Egyptians had dug). What the magicians cannot do is undo. Pharaoh “turned and went into his house, neither did he set his heart to this also.” The chapter ends with the seven-day fulfillment formula and the plague still in effect.
Language & Translation Notes
The hardening-of-Pharaoh’s-heart pattern and its three verbs. The OT uses three distinct Hebrew verbs for the hardening: chazaq (“to be strong, firm,” the most common — 4:21, 7:13, 7:22, 9:12, 10:20, 14:4), kabed (“to be heavy, weighed down” — 7:14, 8:15, 8:32, 9:34), and qashah (“to be hard, stiff” — 7:3, 13:15). The agency alternates: the LORD hardens in 4:21, 7:3, 9:12, 10:1, 10:20, 11:10, 14:4, 14:8, 14:17; Pharaoh hardens his own heart in 8:15, 8:32, 9:34; the verb is passively constructed (heart “was hardened,” agent unnamed) in 7:13, 7:14, 7:22, 8:19, 9:7, 9:35. Standard commentaries note that the distribution is deliberate and resists any simple causal reading. The chapter is not arguing that the LORD overrode Pharaoh’s will; nor is it arguing that Pharaoh’s hardening was simply his own. The two agencies are recorded as concurrent. Paul’s reading at Romans 9:17–18↗ takes the divine-agency strand for its argument about sovereignty; the OT’s own structure preserves both strands at once.
The polemical structure of the plagues. Standard commentaries (Sarna, JPS Torah Commentary, especially) read the ten plagues as a systematic polemic against the Egyptian pantheon. Each plague disables a specific divine domain: (1) Nile to blood — Hapy/Hapi, the deified Nile; (2) frogs — Heqet, the frog-headed goddess of childbirth; (3) lice — chthonic / earth deities; (4) flies — Khepri (the scarab) or other insect-deities; (5) livestock pestilence — Apis and Hathor (the bull and cow cults); (6) boils — Sekhmet (healing/disease); (7) hail — Nut (sky) and Shu (atmosphere); (8) locusts — Senehem (locust-protector); (9) darkness — Ra (the sun, Egypt’s chief deity); (10) firstborn — Pharaoh himself as the divine-firstborn, son of Ra. The pattern is summarized and named at Exodus 12:12↗ (“against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment”). The chapter-by-chapter polemic is not always explicit in the Hebrew text but is recovered through Egyptological background.
The Jannes-and-Jambres tradition. The OT names neither of the Egyptian magicians. Extra-biblical Jewish tradition (the Damascus Document of the Qumran scrolls, CD 5:17-19; Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exod 7:11; later rabbinic writings) names them Jannes and Jambres (with variant spellings — Yochanai and Mamre; Iannes and Iambres). 2 Timothy 3:8↗ takes up the names in Christian scripture, comparing false teachers to the magicians who “withstood Moses.” The names do not appear in the OT itself; SumBible reports the tradition without claiming canonical status for it.