The "gods" of Egypt

by Seth Ben-Mordecai

March 24, 2010

"Upon all the 'gods' of Egypt, I willexecute judgments - I - Adonai, "declaresGod in Exodus 12:12. Quoted in theHaggadah, the passage evokes images ofcataclysmic destruction - Egyptian templesand idols crumbling to dust. Yet, fromMoses' first audience with Pharaoh toplead for the Israelites, to the drowning ofthe Egyptian army, only a dozen unusualevents occur: A staff becoming a crocodile,water turning to blood, frogs proliferating,etc. These events must constitute thepromised "judgments" against Egypt'sgods. Linguistic analysis demonstrates how.

The fourth plague is called arov (hnwr).Its meaning was lost centuries ago, butsome suggest it means "insects,"others "amixture (of wild beasts). "In early Hebrew,arov was pronounced gharab, which isphonologically related to the Egyptianword khpr and its variant, khrb, scarabbeetle. Thus, the fourth plague is a plagueof scarabs.

Scarabs are busy insects: A scarab layseggs in dung, forms the dung into a ball,and rolls the ball into a hole in the riverbankto incubate. Analogizing, Egyptiansbelieved that a god, Scarab, rolled the sunacross the sky by day, pushed it into ahole in the western desert at sunset,rolled it inside the earth at night, andpushed it out in the east at dawn. Unlikemost gods, Scarab dwelt in the interior ofthe earth, not on or above it. And Exodusalludes to the god's address: "Egypt'sbuildings and even the ground they areon will fill up with scarabs...so that[Pharaoh] will know that I, God, am in theinterior of the Earth" (Exodus 12:17-19).

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