Exodus 10:5

God hardened a heart that was already set against him, and Pharaoh remained answerable for every refusal. Exodus speaks of the hardening from both sides. The LORD said beforehand that he would harden Pharaoh’s heart (Exodus 4:21, Exodus 7:3–5), and the heart was hardened from the first sign onward (Exodus 7:13). After the frogs, Pharaoh “hardened his heart” himself (Exodus 8:15), and after the boils the LORD hardened it (Exodus 9:12). What God does is confirm and strengthen the resolve Pharaoh chose, and he turns that resistance into the means of showing his power.

Scripture says the same of every ruler, for the king’s heart is in the hand of the LORD (Proverbs 21:1). Paul takes Pharaoh as his example: “For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might shew my power in thee, and that my name might be declared throughout all the earth. Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth” (Romans 9:17–18).

God’s purposes here reach further than one man. Peter says that the Lord is patient and wants all to come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9), and God also means to display his glory, his justice and his saving power to many people at once. The hardening kept the signs coming until both Egypt and Israel had seen them, and it made Israel’s rescue so plain that it would be told for generations. The long series of plagues also shows God’s patience, since most of them came with a warning and a fresh opportunity to obey. Jesus speaks in a similar way of a man born blind, whose blindness came “that the works of God should be made manifest in him” (John 9:3).

God made himself known by what he did, in a land where gods were judged by their power. The signs showed his rule over everything Egypt trusted, and they gave Israel a history to stand on, the foundation of their faith as a people. A people who had seen the waters turn to blood and the land fill with locusts knew the size of God’s power and how far he stands above every other god. In this way the plagues taught through experience as well as through words.

The command is the one Pharaoh has heard before: “let my people go, that they may serve me” (Exodus 7:16). God calls Israel “my people,” and they belong to him. He had told Pharaoh at the start that Israel was his firstborn son, sent out to serve him (Exodus 4:22–23).

The verb for serve, ʻâbad, means to work, labour, serve, till or worship. It covers the forced labour Israel did for Pharaoh and the worship they owe to God, and the whole struggle is over which master they will serve. God frees Israel so that they can serve him. At Sinai he gathers them into covenant with himself (Exodus 19), and the Ten Commandments open with God naming himself as the one who brought them out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage (Exodus 20:2).

The title marks God’s covenant bond with the people he is delivering, and it sets him apart from the gods of Egypt. Through the plagues he shows that he rules over all creation and over every nation. He had already promised Abraham that in him all families of the earth would be blessed (Genesis 12:3), so his choice of one people served his plan for all.

God is complete in himself and lacks nothing, and the service he asks is for his people’s good and for his purposes in the world. In worship and obedience people find their proper place before their Creator, along with true freedom and joy. Israel’s service would be the way God blessed them and, through them, made himself known to the nations.

The warning in verse 4 is short and exact. “Else, if thou refuse” opens with kîy, a small word that can mean “that”, “because”, “when” or “if”. The English “refuse” comes back from verse 3, and the Hebrew word is again spelled mâʼên. “To let my people go” uses shâlach, the verb to send, and “my people” is ʻam, a people. “Behold” calls attention to what follows. The LORD will bring the locusts, using bôwʼ, the common verb for going and coming, and he himself is the one who acts.

The locust, ʼarbeh, is the winged, swarming locust, named from a root meaning to be many. It arrives in vast numbers and strips the land. They will come into “thy coast”, gᵉbûwl, which means a border and so the whole territory inside it. The KJV’s “coast” means all of Egypt, from border to border.

They will come mâchâr, tomorrow. The day’s notice gave Pharaoh one more opportunity to obey, and when the swarm came on the day God named, no one could call it chance. God’s habit of warning before he acts is affirmed by Amos, who says the Lord God does nothing without revealing his secret to his servants the prophets (Amos 3:7).

Verse 5 describes the swarm. The locusts will cover, kâçâh, which means to cover over or conceal, “the face of the earth”. The Hebrew says the eye, ʻayin, of the land, ʼerets, and the result is “that one cannot be able to see the earth”. The ground would disappear under a moving mass of insects.

Then they will eat “the residue of that which is escaped, which remaineth unto you from the hail.” The residue, yether, is what was left over. The hail, bârâd, had already struck the plants of the field and broken the trees (Exodus 9:25), and some had survived. The locusts were sent for exactly that remnant. They would also eat “every tree which groweth for you out of the field.” A tree, ʻêts, takes years to grow back, so the loss of the trees of the field, sâdeh, meant ruin for years to come. The verb to eat, ʼâkal, also means to devour or consume, and “eat” comes twice in this verse, which presses home how complete the loss would be.

A psalm remembers it: “He spake, and the locusts came, and caterpillers, and that without number, And did eat up all the herbs in their land, and devoured the fruit of their ground” (Psalm 105:34–35). The prophets use the same picture. Joel describes a locust plague that eats what earlier swarms left, as a judgment that calls the people to repent (Joel 1:4), and he pictures the day of the LORD as an army that leaves a garden behind it a desolate wilderness (Joel 2:2–3). In Revelation, locusts rise out of the bottomless pit, and they are sent to torment people and to leave the grass alone (Revelation 9:3–5).

The locusts would go beyond the fields: “they shall fill thy houses, and the houses of all thy servants, and the houses of all the Egyptians.” To fill, mâlêʼ, means to make full, and the swarm would crowd every house, bayith, until there was nowhere to escape them. “Houses” stands three times in verse 6, from Pharaoh’s palace to his officials’ homes to every Egyptian dwelling, so every level of Egypt would feel the judgment.

Moses adds that no one in living memory, or in the memory of their fathers, had seen such a thing “since the day that they were upon the earth unto this day.” Then “he turned himself, and went out from Pharaoh.” To turn, pânâh, means to turn or face, and to go out, yâtsâʼ, means to go out or leave. Moses gives the warning and leaves, and the next move belongs to Pharaoh. The plague came just as he said (Exodus 10:12–15).

God’s warnings show his justice and his patience. He gives clear notice and time to repent, even to an oppressor, so that the suffering that follows is plainly the result of Pharaoh’s own choice. Each warning that Pharaoh ignored also showed how deep his stubbornness went and made God’s power plainer when the judgment fell. And a judgment that arrives exactly when God said it would confirms that his word is true.

God brought them by his own power. Locust swarms were known in Egypt and the lands around it, and they could wipe out a harvest. This one came on the day God named, in numbers no one had seen, and it was aimed at exactly what the hail had spared. Earlier God had also set apart the land of Goshen, where his people lived, so that the flies did not touch it (Exodus 8:22–23). Timing, scale and that kind of distinction point to God’s hand.

God rules over all creation, and Scripture shows him using the forces of nature to judge, as in the flood (Genesis 7). The whole creation now groans under the fall (Romans 8:22), and disasters come in a fallen world. To name a particular modern disaster as God’s punishment for a particular sin is to claim knowledge we lack, so believers meet such events with humility and seek God’s mercy. The greatest judgment on sin fell on Christ, in whom God condemned sin in the flesh (Romans 8:3), and the final judgment is still to come (Revelation 20:11–15).

The plagues had built up until the country reached breaking point. The hail had been the worst yet. It struck crops and livestock and killed people who were out in the fields (Exodus 9:18–26). Now locusts were coming for whatever was left, and the servants could see that Egypt’s survival mattered more than their king’s pride.

Moses and Aaron “were brought again unto Pharaoh,” summoned back under the pressure of the servants and the land’s suffering. Pharaoh begins as if he has given in: “Go, serve the LORD your God.” The command “Go” is yâlak, to walk or go, and “serve” is ʻâbad, the verb of verse 3. Here is the king who had once said, “Who is the LORD, that I should obey his voice?” (Exodus 5:2), naming Israel’s God as Yᵉhôvâh.

Then he adds his condition: “but who are they that shall go?” The verb here is hâlak, also meaning to walk or go, and the question is a demand to set the terms. Pharaoh had already offered lesser terms, first to sacrifice within Egypt and then to go only a short way (Exodus 8:25, Exodus 8:28). He is ready to allow a religious ceremony as long as he keeps hold of the people who do his work.

Moses answers, “We will go with our young and with our old, with our sons and with our daughters, with our flocks and with our herds will we go; for we must hold a feast unto the LORD.” The list leaves nobody out. It runs from the youngest to the oldest, takes in sons and daughters, and ends with the sheep, the goats and the cattle. “Go” opens and closes the list, and Moses insists on it.

The reason is the feast, chag. The word comes from a root meaning to move in a circle or keep a festival, and it means a pilgrimage feast with a journey and sacrifices, the kind of gathering that brings the whole people together. The flocks and herds were needed for the offerings, and Moses later says it outright: “there shall not an hoof be left behind” (Exodus 10:26). With every animal gone, Pharaoh would also have nothing left to hold over them to force their return.

Worship in Israel took in the whole household and all that it had. Moses later commands Israel to love the LORD with all their heart, soul and might (Deuteronomy 6:5), and Joshua says, “as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD” (Joshua 24:15).

Pharaoh replies with sarcasm: “Let the LORD be so with you, as I will let you go, and your little ones.” It sounds like a blessing, and it means the opposite: the LORD would be with them as surely as Pharaoh would let their children go, which he never meant to do. The little ones, ṭaph, are the children who depend on their mothers, and more widely a household’s dependents. To let them go would mean a complete exodus with no one left behind to come back for.

Then comes a threat: “look to it; for evil is before you.” “Look to it” is râʼâh, to see, and here it means “see to it” or “beware”. The word evil, raʻ, can mean moral evil, and it can also mean harm, trouble, mischief or disaster. In Pharaoh’s mouth it carries both an accusation and a warning. He accuses them of mischief, a plan to escape for good under cover of worship, and he warns that trouble will come on them if they persist, from his own hand. The evil he spoke of fell on Egypt in the end, while God’s people went free.

Pharaoh closes the meeting with “Not so”, his own flat refusal of what Moses asked. He offers only this: “go now ye that are men, and serve the LORD; for that ye did desire.” The word for men, geber, means a man, at root a strong or valiant man, and generally a person. Pharaoh would send only the grown men and keep the women, the children and the animals as pledges that the men would come back. That was a twisting of Israel’s worship, where the feasts took in whole families, as when Elkanah went up with all his house to offer the yearly sacrifice (1 Samuel 1:21).

“And they were driven out from Pharaoh’s presence.” The verb, gârash, means to drive out or expel. The talking was over. The locusts came (Exodus 10:12–15), Pharaoh confessed his sin for a moment and then hardened again (Exodus 10:16–17), and darkness followed (Exodus 10:21–23). The same resistance runs through Exodus 7–14 until it ends at the sea (Exodus 14). The LORD brings the counsel of the nations to nothing, and his own counsel stands for ever (Psalm 33:10–11).

Pharaoh wanted to keep his workforce and his pride. He treated Israel as property of the state, and each offer was meant to give the least he could while keeping the rest as security. His pride, and a heart hardened as God had said it would be, kept him from giving way until he was broken. The bargaining itself showed how hard his heart had become.

Here chag means a solemn gathering of worship in general. The same word is used later for Israel’s appointed pilgrim feasts, Passover, Weeks and Tabernacles, and the Passover itself is instituted after this, in Exodus 12. Moses’ concern at this point is the freedom to worship the LORD fully, with all that worship required.

God’s covenant is with the whole people. Children belong to the covenant community, and they needed to be there to take part, to learn, and to inherit the faith of their parents. Leaving them in Egypt would have split families and cut the line by which the faith passes on. At Pentecost Peter says the same of the new covenant: “For the promise is unto you, and to your children” (Acts 2:39).

Moses asked for everyone, and “for that ye did desire” is Pharaoh’s own version of the request. Moses had just named young and old, sons and daughters, flocks and herds. Pharaoh shrinks that into a request for the men alone and then grants it as a favour, keeping control while appearing to give way.