Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Staff That Became a Serpent
Exodus 7:1-13
1 Yahweh said to Moses, “Behold, I have made you as God to Pharaoh; and Aaron your brother shall be your prophet. · WEB
The contest opens with an imitation that succeeds and then is swallowed, and with the first of many statements about a hardened heart.
Behold, I have made you as God to Pharaoh; and Aaron your brother shall be your prophet Exodus 7:1.
The arrangement conceded in chapter four is now formalized and its logic stated. A prophet is not a man with opinions about God; he is a man who says what he is given to say. The relationship between Moses and Aaron is offered as a working definition of the office.
I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt Exodus 7:3.
The sentence is stated here and must be read against what the narrative then reports, because the two are given in a deliberate order. Through the first five plagues the hardening is Pharaoh's own act — he hardened his heart Exodus 8:15, Pharaoh's heart was stubborn Exodus 7:14, Pharaoh hardened his heart this time also Exodus 8:32 — and only at the sixth does the text say Yahweh hardened the heart of Pharaoh Exodus 9:12. The announcement comes first; the sequence follows. Read together they describe one process with two agents in it, and the order in which Scripture assigns the verb is the whole of the explanation.
What God does is send evidence, repeatedly, to a man determined to refuse it. Mercy pressed on a settled refusal does not soften; it sets. The sun that melts wax hardens clay, and the difference lies in the material rather than in the sun. God is not described as creating an unwillingness that was not there — the king announced his own position before any sign was given, in the first sentence he spoke Exodus 5:2. He is described as continuing to press a case that a stubborn man was becoming steadily less able to abandon. That is judgment, and it is judgment of a particular kind: the confirming of a choice already made, by the very kindness that offered a way out of it.
Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh and before his servants, and it became a serpent Exodus 7:10.
The sign is chosen for its audience. The rearing cobra was worn on the Egyptian crown as the emblem of royal power, and the demonstration puts one on the throne-room floor under someone else's control.
They also, the magicians of Egypt, did the same thing with their enchantments Exodus 7:11. The imitation is reported without explanation, and it should not be explained away; Scripture elsewhere speaks plainly of power at work in signs that are lies 2 Thessalonians 2:9. What matters here is that the copy is not the answer to it. Aaron's rod swallowed up their rods Exodus 7:12. Duplication proves nothing about authority. The question was never whether something similar could be produced, but whose power holds when the two are placed in the same room.
Pharaoh sees a rod consume the rods of his entire court and is unmoved Exodus 7:13. He has what he needs — a matching performance — and the swallowing is simply not counted.
held with reason What this mark means