[Imu] Welcome to Into the Verse, where we share new and unexpected insights about the parsha or an upcoming holiday… diving deep into the verses to uncover the Torah’s own commentary on itself. 

Now, for our inaugural episode, we have a special treat for you. It’s an incredible piece by Rabbi Fohrman that we put together a few years ago, and I think it makes the perfect Pesach episode. The kind of thing that can really help you prepare for the Seder. Because, you know, Seder prep can be tough! The Seder can be tough, in part because It’s a predictable, well-worn story. After all, we’ve been retelling it in the exact same way for countless generations. And it’s not only that we say the identical words every year. The rituals, even the food – it all stays the same. There’s also the charoset that has to be made with exactly the same recipe, because people will complain if you change it. There’s that felt matzah cover that somebody made in preschool… has that been on the table for years, or is it decades? We know that on Seder night, all of us should feel as if we ourselves had left Egypt. But how are we supposed to recapture the amazement our ancestors must have felt, when everything about our Pesach observance is so... familiar?

So here’s what I think: It’s true, the Torah’s stories are familiar to us, but when we read them very attentively and try to see them with fresh eyes, sometimes we discover new things, details we never noticed before. So today, we’re bringing you Rabbi David Fohrman’s thoughts on “The Three Great Lies of the Exodus.” Now, if you’ve already seen that video on the Aleph Beta website, Rabbi Fohrman has updated the version that you’re about to hear with a bunch of new, never-heard-before material. In this close look at the story, Rabbi Fohrman notices clues as to how our ancestors might have felt about God’s miracles in the Exodus. And it turns out, there’s a bit of a paradox: Even the people who originally lived through those astonishing miracles might have sensed a certain… familiarity about them. But how? And why would that be? Here’s Rabbi Fohrman.

[Rabbi Fohrman] Hi everybody, this is Rabbi David Fohrman, and welcome to Aleph Beta.

It’s Pesach season, and there's lots of really interesting things we can talk about in Pesach season. We can talk about the pyrotechnics of the plagues, we can talk about the tense bargaining sessions between Moses and Pharaoh – you name it. But today, we are not going to talk about any of the really interesting parts of the Exodus. We're going to talk about the boring stuff, the stuff that gets cut out of almost every cinematic representation of the Exodus story, from The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston to The Prince of Egypt – you name it, no one talks about this. We're going to talk about the three signs that take place at the burning bush.

Yep, the three signs. You know, you might not remember that there even were three signs that took place at the burning bush. But at the burning bush, Moses says to God: Look, Master of the Universe, You've got the wrong guy, just forget about it, they are never going to believe me. The people are not even going to think that God appeared to me. This whole thing is just not going to work! And to prove that it will, God gives him three signs, signs that he can reproduce to inspire belief in anybody who might see them. 

1.Three Persuasive Signs

First, God tells Moses to take his staff, to cast it down, and then it turns into a snake. Moses recoils, but God says: No, no, no, no – grab hold of the tail of that snake! Moses does so, and it turns back into a staff. So God says: They should believe you if they see that sign, but if they don't, here’s a second sign – take your hand, put it in your cloak next to your chest, and then take it out. Moses does so, and when he takes out his hand, מְצֹרַעַת כַּשָּׁלֶג (Exodus 4:6), it’s leprous, it’s as if it’s afflicted with צרעת, it’s as white as snow. He then puts his hand back into his cloak, takes it out again – and suddenly his flesh is healed. 

So then God says: Those are two things that really should inspire belief in anybody who sees them, but if that doesn't work, take some water from the river Nile, pour it on the ground, and it will turn into blood. And that's it. Those are the three signs that are going to convince anybody who might be skeptical about Moses’ mission.

If you just think about those three signs in a vacuum, you’d say: Oh wow, those signs are pretty cool, I don't know anybody who can do those magic tricks, if I saw those things maybe I’d believe too! But let me ask you a couple of questions about that.

Question number 1: Is there any meaning to these particular signs? Could God just as easily have said: And now, Moses, to prove that you in fact represent Me, the Almighty – take Aaron and put him behind this black cloak and take out this saber and slash him in two, and magically he's going to step right out from behind that cloak and he's going to be whole again, he won't have been harmed! And if they don't believe that, Moses, here's a big top hat, reach your hand in and take out a rabbit out of the hat! 

Is that what these signs are? Are these just sort of random, really impressive Divine magic tricks? Is there any rhyme or reason as to why these particular things were shown to Moses – the staff and the snake, the white hand, the water turning into blood? Why were these the things that were supposed to inspire belief?

Okay, so that's one question. But here's another question. Let's talk about the effectiveness of these signs. How effective were they, really, at achieving their aims?

If you actually look at how this played out, for example, there's this moment when, very dramatically, Aaron casts down his staff, and it turns into this great snake-like thing. So it's very impressive, right? But look at the next thing that happens. Pharaoh's magicians, his astrologers, they cast those staffs down, and they also turn into snakes. So, you know, what's the deal with that? I mean, if you're God, couldn't you have come up with a magic trick that no one else could do? You know, if Pharaoh’s magicians can do it, who cares about those tricks? How impressive is that? It's just garden-variety magic! 

So, maybe you’d protest and say: Well, you know, at the end of the day, Aaron's staff does end up swallowing all the other snakes, so you see that God's magic is of a higher caliber than the Egyptians’ magic! I suppose you could say that. But couldn't God have picked a sign that no one else could replicate at all? It doesn't seem to be a really great belief-instigator, if Pharaoh's astrologers can more or less do the same thing.

So again, maybe you'd respond that, well look, but maybe Pharaoh wasn't the main intended audience; the main intended audience were the Israelites themselves. After all, Moses' issue that he expressed back at the burning bush to God is that “the people, the Israelites, won't believe me!” So maybe the signs were there to inspire faith among the people, not for Pharaoh’s astrologers? So let's examine that possibility, and let's ask, how good were these signs at actually inspiring faith among the people?

Let’s look and see what happens. Moses, he comes back from the burning bush, he gathers everyone together and he shows them the signs, and the text says: וַיַּאֲמֵן הָעָם (Exodus 4:31) – The people believed, just like God said they would. So end of story, right? It worked. But how well did it really work? The people actually seem to lose this faith very quickly. Early on in the narrative of the exodus from Egypt, Pharaoh, annoyed at Moses, he doubles the workload of the people. And when that happens, the people seem to lose whatever faith they had. וַיִּפְגְּעוּ אֶת מֹשֶׁה וְאֶת אַהֲרֹן (Exodus 5:20) – they met up with Moses and Aaron, just as Moses and Aaron were leaving the palace, and the people said to them: What are you guys doing?!? You've just made everything worse for us! By making demands on Pharaoh, you've done nothing but given them a sword with which to kill us. Leave us alone with all this talk about exodus. Let’s just serve Pharaoh in peace and forget about all this nonsense.

Look, it doesn't seem like the signs have been doing very much at this point. So why even bother with them? It's no wonder that every movie representation of this story leaves them out. Why are they even there?

2. The Meaning of Belief

So here is the beginning of a very tentative theory I want to share with you. According to the text, the signs are there to inspire belief. Now look again at the Hebrew word that appears when Moses expresses his worry to God: וְהֵן לֹא יַאֲמִינוּ לִי (Exodus 4:1) – They won't believe me, Moses says to God. Moreover, after Moses actually does perform the signs for the people, look what it says: וַיַּאֲמֵן הָעָם (Exodus 4:31) – and the people had faith, the people believed. You see, it’s the same Hebrew word there, it appears both times: The signs are there to inspire emunah, which we often translate as “faith” or “belief.” And then, the people see the signs, and they in fact have faith, or believe, they do have emunah. But what exactly do we mean by emunah in this context? What do we mean, really, by this kind of belief?

And by the way, it happens a third time, at the culmination of the Exodus story, at the very final triumph of Israel, the crossing of the Sea of Reeds. After Israel crosses the water and after the pursuing Egyptian army is smashed by the waves, the text says again: וַיַּאֲמִינוּ בַּיקוָה וּבְמֹשֶׁה עַבְדּוֹ (Exodus 14:31) – The people believed in God and Moses His servant. 

So you see, over and over again, we are talking about emunah, belief: The signs are there to inspire emunah; the people see the signs and they believe, וַיַּאֲמֵן הָעָם; the sea splits and the people believe again, וַיַּאֲמִינוּ בַּיקוָה וּבְמֹשֶׁה עַבְדּוֹ. But throughout this all, it's not so easy to figure out exactly what this word means. If it means conventional belief in God, believing that there is a higher power in the Universe who likes the Hebrews and is willing to assist them – well, these points in the Exodus don't really seem like turning points from a belief or emunah standpoint. Because, if you would have asked me to pick a moment in the Exodus story where a non-believer might look at events and say: Hey, you know, if that's really happening I'm changing my mind, now I believe… I don't think I would have picked either of the places in which the Torah talks about belief among people who see amazing things. I wouldn’t have picked the three signs on the one hand, and I wouldn’t have picked the splitting of the Sea on the other hand.

I wouldn't have picked the three signs because they're not dramatic enough, they just seem to be magic tricks, so I don't know if that would have done it for me. And you know, when we look at the story of the splitting of the Sea, I would say: Boy, that’s pretty impressive, I would definitely believe in God if walls of water came magically cascading down on my enemies and the Sea split! But the truth is, I think I would have believed even before that. Because what happened in the middle, before the splitting of the Sea? There were these huge, grand, epic plagues, ten of them: the entire Nile turns to blood, hailstones rained down with fire and ice frozen in the same hailstone. I mean, all of that has “Master of the Universe” written all over it. If you saw the ten plagues, those things would make you believe! So I would have believed long before the splitting of the Sea; it wouldn't take the splitting of the Sea to make me believe.

So the problem is that the two times the Torah talks about belief don't seem to actually be the moments where most people would turn the corner on belief. The three signs, it's too little. The splitting of the Sea, it’s too late. But the text is telling you that it's not so. The text says the moments to look at when you think about emunah are the three signs, and then again much later on at the splitting of the Sea. 

What I want to suggest to you is that the three signs that take place at the burning bush – they aren’t trivial things to be written out of the story, they're not these random magic tricks. The signs help us understand a deep, underlying truth about the Exodus. By engineering the ten plagues, by engineering our escape from Egypt, God didn't just make us free. All that’s true, but beyond all that, the Exodus did something else too. It inspired us to understand why we ought to be loyal to God, why we have a right to believe that God can actually connect with us. Let’s take a look at these three signs more closely, and let’s try to discern the story they have to tell us. 

3. A God Who Redeems

So let's come back to that issue that we started discussing – what the purpose of the signs was. Remember, according to the text, their purpose is to inspire faith among those who will see the signs. But as we suggested, faith is a tricky word. I suggested to you that if faith means faith that God exists, then the three signs, they seem like a pretty lousy way of demonstrating that. Somebody comes to you and says: Hey, my name is Bill, and I’m the head of a new cult religion and I’m here to convince you that our belief system is real – here's my three magic tricks! And then he performs three really impressive magic tricks. You know, it would take more than that for most of us to believe in Bill. We know not to put too much faith in magic tricks.

So the three signs, maybe, weren't such a great demonstration that God exists, but maybe they weren't supposed to demonstrate that. Maybe it wasn't about demonstrating God’s existing; it was about demonstrating who this God is. And in fact, if you look at the verses, that's actually what the verses themselves seem to suggest. Because right before revealing these signs to Moses, God gives Moses a message to deliver, a message that Moses fears the people won't believe: “Gather together all of the elders of Israel and tell them that God – Yod Heh and Vav and Heh – this God appeared to you. And tell them this:

פָּקֹד פָּקַדְתִּי אֶתְכֶם וְאֶת הֶעָשׂוּי לָכֶם בְּמִצְרָיִם׃

I have surely redeemed/remembered them and what was done to them in Egypt.” (Exodus 3:16)

פָּקַדְתִּי – Tell them that I have redeemed them. But actually, פקד – that’s actually a tricky word. It’s a word that's associated not just with redemption but with memory. I have remembered them. Remembered, maybe, with intent to redeem. So the signs show us that God is פקד – He is committing to redeem the people. But the verse also says something else. He’s not just committing to redeem them. He is committing to redeem וְאֶת־הֶעָשׂוּי לָכֶם בְּמִצְרָיִם – what was done to them in Egypt.

Why isn’t it enough just to redeem the people? What does it mean to redeem what was done to them in Egypt? Well, the text explains this a little bit more after Moses actually performs the signs. The people see the signs, וַיַּאֲמֵן הָעָם –  and the people believe. What do they believe, though? כִּי פָקַד יְקוָה אֶת בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל – that God had remembered-slash-redeemed them. And then, וְכִי רָאָה אֶת עָנְיָם (Exodus 4:31). The people who saw the signs came to believe something else: that God had seen their suffering, that God had seen their torment. 

That’s what the signs are about. That’s the kind of belief they were meant to inspire.

You see, evidently, there were actually two things the signs were supposed to accomplish. The people needed to believe something about the future, but they also needed to believe something about the past. The signs would help them understand that yes, פָּקֹד פָּקַדְתִּי – redemption lies around the corner for them in the future, they’re going to go free. But they also had to understand וְכִי רָאָה אֶת עָנְיָם – that God had seen the past; that God had seen their pain, their torment. They need to understand that the God who redeems them, who sets them free, is also the God who sees their past. Without that understanding, somehow, everything is lost. 

But why? Why is the past so important?

4.Why the Past Is Important

The answer to that, I think, is that when you look carefully at the Israelite experience in Egypt, it wasn’t just about being enslaved with backbreaking labor, as terrible as that was. Something else was going on, something devious. There were lies that accompanied the enslavement of Israel. Three great lies, I would argue. And the three signs, I want to suggest, they speak directly to those three lies. 

You see, it is one thing for somebody to hurt you. It is another thing for them to hurt you and lie about it, to pretend that nothing happened, that life in all respects is fine and normal. To redeem someone from that kind of suffering – pain plus lies – it’s not enough to just set them free. The victim who’s been abused in that way can feel that their suffering means that something is wrong with them. There's this weird logic behind it. The victims, they’re feeling all this pain, but the perpetrator, they’re denying that anything’s even wrong. And besides, life is so normal for them – they seem entirely oblivious to there being anything wrong in the first place! It's like I'm crazy if I'm complaining, it's like this is all just happening in my own head. The abuser seems so normal; I must be the not-normal one. 

That's why this kind of abuse, the lying kind of abuse that happened in Egypt, needs so desperately to be “redeemed” in some kind of special way. The victim, for redemption to happen, needs to actually see that the aggressor is confronted with what they've done. And once confronted, the aggressor has a choice: They might just own up to the truth and apologize for what they've done. But even if they don’t, it’s still the beginning of a redemptive process. The lie is still beginning to be redeemed. Because just the fact that the aggressor is confronted with the lie – it starts, in some way, to put things right. I don’t feel crazy anymore.  What happened to me is real. And a natural continuation of this validation is not just to make an oppressor face the reality of his lie; it is also to make that lie come back to bite the aggressor, or haunt him in some way. 

That's why it wasn't enough just for God to set the Israelites free, just to take them out of bondage in Egypt on some kind of magic carpet. In order to redeem the people, God also had to redeem וְאֶת הֶעָשׂוּי לָכֶם בְּמִצְרָיִם – what had been done to them in Egypt. God had to deal with the trauma. God had to deal with the lies. 

And how does God do that? The three signs show you the path. The three signs show you the lies. Let's examine those signs, and I think you'll see what I mean.

5.The Signs and the Lies

As we look at these three mysterious signs – the staff turning into a snake, the white leprous hand, and the water turning into blood – we might well ask: Where are we even going to start if we’re going to figure out what it all might mean? And I’d like to suggest to you that maybe a good place to start is at the end, the last of the signs. Because the Torah suggests that the last of the signs actually might be the easiest to understand. 

Remember, when God delivered these signs to Moses, God had said to him: וְהָיָה אִם לֹא יַאֲמִינוּ לָךְ – if they don't believe you, וְלֹא יִשְׁמְעוּ לְקֹל הָאֹת הָרִאשׁוֹן – if they don't listen to the first sign, well then, they'll listen to the voice of the next sign. And if they don't listen to the voice of the second sign, then take from the waters of the Nile, pour it on the ground, and when the water hits the ground, וְהָיוּ לְדָם בַּיַּבָּשֶׁת – then it will turn into blood (Exodus 4:8-9). It seems like this progression, that if they don’t get the first sign, if that’s too subtle – well, the second thing makes things even more obvious, and the third thing makes things more obvious still. That third and last sign, that’s supposed to be the dead giveaway. They’ll really get things then. 

Okay, so let’s ask: Why would the meaning of that third sign – take the water from the Nile, pour it on the ground, it’ll turn to blood – why would the meaning of that have been so obvious to the people?

6. Third Sign: Water into Blood

Well, think about what’s going to happen later in the story. What does this remind you of, water from the Nile turning into blood? Well, that's pretty obvious, right? It really reminds us of the first plague that happens later, when all the water in the Nile turns to blood. It seems like somehow that first plague has been presaged here in this last sign. Okay, good – let’s now think about that first plague, and let’s ask ourselves: Was there any rationale for that? Why, of all things, did that end up being the first plague – water turning into blood? 

When you think about it nowadays, with 3000 years of distance between the events of the past and today, maybe it just seems like a nifty trick. Water into blood – that's a way to start off the plagues with style! And we can sort of pontificate about all sorts of interesting possibilities. The Nile was, maybe, the lifeblood of Egypt, so the first thing that God did was hit them where it counted, with the Nile… There's all kinds of theories you could come up with. 

But pretend you’re actually there. What would it have meant to you, what would it have meant to the people of Israel themselves, to have the Nile turned to blood? How would that have begun to redeem what was done to them in Egypt – וְאֶת הֶעָשׂוּי לָכֶם בְּמִצְרָיִם –  in God's own words?

So think back. Is there anything in Israel’s past experience that reminds you of that first plague? Well, what would you say is the worst thing the Egyptians ever did to the Israelites over the many long years of enforced slavery? It wasn't just the backbreaking labor, it wasn't just the fact that they didn't get paid for their work, and it wasn't even the cruelty of the taskmasters in the field. It was something else. It was the babies in the Nile. Pharaoh had decreed that all baby boys who were born would be thrown into the Nile to drown. And as if the murder of children wasn't horrifying enough in and of itself, they chose to use the Nile to do it. Their whole economy depended on the Nile, and now they're using it for murder. Why? What was in it for Egypt to do it that way?

7. A Lie About the Nile

It's because they hoped the Nile would cover up the crime. The logic was that you wouldn't see the victims; the Nile would just look like its placid old self, with the sun shimmering off the water. There was a kind of built-in plausible deniability here. The Ramban, in commenting on the murder of the children, explains that when the verse says וַיְצַו פַּרְעֹה לְכָל עַמּוֹ (Exodus 1:22) – that Pharaoh commanded all of his people to throw the children into the Nile – “all of his people” suggests the townsfolk, the regular people. It wasn't carried out by uniformed representatives of the Egyptian government, this slaughter. No, regular ordinary people would find a Jewish child, cast him into the Nile… and then, when the bereaved Israelite family would come to the authorities, the authorities would ask for proof, would ask for witnesses, and of course, the Nile would cover all the crimes. For the Israelites, it would be this huge disconnect in their experience. The night would be full of screams and anguish, children taken from the arms of their parents, and the morning would come, and you'd go outside, and somehow everything would look normal. The Nile looks just the same as it did before. The Egyptians are out there sunbathing on the shore, reading Schopenhauer and playing Mozart on stolen pianos. And the Israelites are left alone. Alone with their grief, to wonder whether they're the crazy ones.

As if the crime wasn't bad enough, nature would help hide the crime. The water looked just the same as before… until… until the first plague, until the water turned to blood. The truth would now be on display. There's no hiding anymore; the aggressor is confronted with the reality of his crime. 

And what is justice for the aggressor is actually the beginning of redemption for the victim. Because the lies are finally over now. The disconnect is over. I wasn't crazy; everybody knows now! That's the first great act of Divine compassion: Nature itself shows that it knows, there's no secrets any more. In the plague of blood, God is showing the people: I’ve seen your suffering. I know what they did to you. 

8. The Beginning of Redemption

Confronted with the reality of their crime, the Egyptians now have a choice. They could choose to own up to the crime, to let the Israelites go, to apologize – and it could all be over here, and a kind of justice would have been done. But if the Egyptians persisted in the lie, then things would progress still further. Further elements of the Exodus would continue the process of displaying empathy to Israel for the torment covered over by lies, and further elements of the Exodus would express radical truth-telling to the Egyptian aggressors. More subtle lies would yet be uncovered. 

Because remember, the water turning into blood– that was only one of the signs. There were two others before that as well. What did they mean? They touched on two other great lies of Egypt. What were those? We’ll explore them in just a moment. 

9. A More Subtle Lie

So just by way of review, I've suggested to you that the three signs actually correspond to three great crimes committed by the Egyptians, to three great lies about those crimes. 

Indeed, when the Egyptians drowned Israel’s children in the Nile, that was neither their first crime nor their first lie. There were others before this. 

Going back to the three signs for a minute, if the third sign was the most obvious, the second sign was a bit more subtle, a little bit harder to get. Perhaps it signifies a lie on the part of the Egyptians that, for all its treachery, was a little more subtle. What could that lie have been?  

10. Second Sign: The White Hand

Well, the second sign is the one in which God tells Moses to take his hand, put it inside his clothes, next to his chest. And when he takes the hand out, it's ashen white, as if it were afflicted by leprosy. Then he's supposed to put his hand back inside his clothes and take it out once more, and this time, the apparent leprosy is gone. Almost as if the whole leprosy thing was just one big fake, all a lie. But what could fake leprosy possibly signify back in Israel’s traumatic experience in Egypt? 

To understand that, let's look deeper at the idea of leprosy, this ghostly white state that flesh can sometimes assume. Let’s look at how the Torah itself speaks about that leprous state of being for flesh. 

So as it turns out, aside from Moses’ hand in this sign, throughout the entire Five Books of Moses we never find anybody else actually afflicted by leprosy, except for one person. That one person was Miriam, the sister of Moses and Aaron. It happens much later on in the Torah, in the Book of Numbers. And when it happens, look at what Aaron, her brother, says about her. He begs for Miriam to be healed, and he uses a very sad and grim comparison to describe the state of being that a leprous person suffers. Aaron says these words: אַל נָא תְהִי כַּמֵּת (Numbers 2:12) – Let her not be like someone who’s died. And if we stop right there in his words, the first thing we see is that the Torah identifies the state of tzara’at – the state of being afflicted with leprosy – with death. Which kind of makes sense: When is it that flesh turns ghostly white? When somebody dies, when blood drains from the flesh.

But if you go back to what Aaron said and you keep on reading, you'll find that that verse actually offers a more narrow characterization of what tzara’at is like. It’s not just like death in some generic sense. It’s actually much more specific, much more chilling. אַל נָא תְהִי כַּמֵּת Aaron said, let her not be like a dead person, אֲשֶׁר בְּצֵאתוֹ מֵרֶחֶם אִמּוֹ וַיֵּאָכֵל חֲצִי בְשָׂרוֹ – let her not be as an infant that had just come out of its mother's womb without having its flesh intact, an infant that died in the womb. Aaron is calling attention to Miriam’s suffering by identifying the state of tzara’at as having something in common with being a stillborn, with being like someone who died in their mother's womb.

So let's go back to the second sign now and add it all up. A hand that turns leprous once you put it into your coat, next to your breast – but it's really a lie, it's fake leprosy, because really it's a healthy hand. You put your hand there, and you take it out again, and it’s healthy again. So what is leprosy? It's a kind of death. What kind of death? The death of a failed birth. The death experience of delivering a stillborn. 

What does that remind you of, when you think about Israel’s experience in Egypt? Did Israel ever experience a lie, an illusion, concerning stillborns? It most certainly did. 

11. A Lie About Stillborns

וַיֹּאמֶר מֶלֶךְ מִצְרַיִם לַמְיַלְּדֹת הָעִבְרִיֹּת … וַיֹּאמֶר בְּיַלֶּדְכֶן אֶת הָעִבְרִיּוֹת וּרְאִיתֶן עַל הָאׇבְנָיִם אִם בֵּן הוּא וַהֲמִתֶּן אֹתוֹ 

And the king of Egypt said to the midwives, who were Hebrews… he said to them: When you facilitate the birth of the Hebrew women, and you see the children on the birthstones, if it's a male child, kill it… 

(Exodus 1:15-16)

And as commentators like the Ibn Ezra explain, that means kill it secretly, which means what? It’s talking about a lie. If you were the midwife, you’d tell the mother that her child had just not survived. But of course, that was false. The midwife had secretly killed the child before handing it over to the mother. It had been born healthy. It had been born alive. 

And that was the second great lie of Egypt: The midwives were instructed to lie about stillborns.

This lie, of course, was a little bit more subtle than the one we spoke about before. It involved killing the children in absolute secret and then covering it up by claiming that the babies were stillborns. But the Torah tells us that the midwives heroically resisted Pharaoh's decrees. So when this more subtle way of killing children didn’t work well enough for Pharaoh, the king moved to the next level of mobilization against Israel. And that led to the lie that we started talking about when we first began to look at these three signs: The babies being thrown in the water to drown, and the lie of the shimmering Nile that covers all crimes.

12. First Sign: Staff into Snake

So now, as we continue going backwards through the signs, we finally reach the first of the three. What was that first sign all about? This is the one about the staff turning into a snake, then going back to a staff again. Well, if we are right about the pattern we’ve been seeing, it too, would seem to have signified an Egyptian lie. But a lie about what? 

Well, it seems like, as we’ve been moving backward through the signs, we’ve also been moving backwards in time. Because that last sign, the one about the water and the blood – that signified Egypt’s final attempt at genocide. And the sign before that, the one about the hand with tzara’at – that signified Egypt’s earlier, more subtle attempt at killing. So could the first of the signs signify something that was even earlier, something that was even more subtle? 

But what could it have been? And what would it have to do with, of all things… a staff turning into a snake? Let’s try and figure that out.