Page 24 - Advanced Biblical Backgrounds Student Textbook

revered. In this mighty act Yahweh
decisively proves He, not Ra, is in
control of the sun.

Pharaoh: Claims to be a God In response to Pharaoh’s This decisively proved Yahweh, not
himself. His firstborn son would also decision to kill every firstborn Pharaoh was the ultimate God. After
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be seen as a God in that culture. son of the Jews, Yahweh kills being broken by this plague, the
the firstborn sons of the Pharaoh lets the Jews go.
Egyptians.

Yahweh was showing in no uncertain terms that He and He alone was the true God. He alone deserved
the worship that was being wrongly directed toward the so-called gods of Egypt. Ira Friedman purports
that though the judgment of the plagues was directed at all of the Egyptian deities, it was particularly
directed at the most popular deity of the time whose name was Sekhmet. According to Friedman
Sekhmet was responsible for sending plague and pestilence. She was the daughter of Ra and sister of
Hathor. The Egyptians came to believe that Sekhmet could send pestilence on them or their enemies.
As a result, they worshipped her in order to entice her to send it on their enemies. She also was seen as
able to send healing.

Egypt had many local gods in the form of a bull,
typified by this relief sculpture from the Cairo
Museum. The sacred apis bull of Memphis was
known to the Hebrews, and Moses’ destruction of
the golden calf was an attempt to rid Israel of this
type of idolatrous worship.

The social and economic culture of Egypt:
Egypt was an economic might of the patriarchal world. Its location on the Mediterranean Sea and the
Nile was instrumental in Egypt’s rise to prominence. Egyptian families had many children. Those in more
affluent families would hire a wet nurse to care for them. Those in less affluent families would nurse
their own children. This is consistent with the daughter of Pharaoh hiring the mother of Moses to nurse
the baby. Circumcision was a regular practice of the Egyptians that partially marked the transfer of being
a boy to a man.
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41 Zondervan Academic. Egyptian Gods Against Whom the Plagues Were Possibly Directed.
https://zondervanacademic.com/blog/what-the-bible-tells-us-about-the-10-plagues-of-egypt; Also
consulted was Ten Egyptian Plagues for Ten Egyptian Gods and Goddesses.
http://www.stat.rice.edu/~dobelman/Dinotech/10_Eqyptian_gods_10_Plagues.pdf and
Plagues." Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought 48, no. 1 (2015): 8-18. Accessed July 14, 2020.
www.jstor.org/stable/44821255.
42 Voss, Nelson's New Illustrated Bible Manners and Customs, 68.

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