God responds to Moses’s complaint saying he will make him like God to Pharaoh and Aaron will be his prophet telling him to let the Israelites go. Again God warns Moses that Pharaoh will not listen, so God will “raise his hand to him.”

The text lets us know that at this time Moses was eighty and Aaron eighty three. A lifetime had passed while Moses was in the desert, but God was just getting started with Moses, and with Egypt. 

So Moses and Aaron go back to Pharaoh. They demonstrate the power of God by turning the stick into a snake. Pharaoh’s magicians do the same with their staffs, but Moses’s snake eats the snakes. Pharaoh’s heart is hardened, just as they were warned. Small demonstrations of power aren’t going to be enough to make him change his mind. 

The next morning, Moses meets Pharaoh at the Nile river’s edge. He repeats that God has sent him to deliver the Israelites. This is the same river that the earlier Pharaoh demanded the Hebrew children be thrown into and the same one Moses was drawn out of by the Pharaoh’s daughter. This river carried memories. 

On God’s command, Moses uses his staff to strike the river turning it into blood. Again the magicians repeat the trick, so Pharaoh remains unimpressed. Fish die and the river stinks. The Nile stays that way for a week and people are forced to dig wells for clean water. 

Here we see water turn into blood, perhaps as a reminder of that what Egyptians did carried consequence. Pharaoh’s magicians repeated the two feats, so his mind was unmoved. He also wasn’t swayed by Moses or the struggle of his own people to get clean water. 

When I taught this story to college students, some were concerned that the Egyptians suffered because of their bad leader. Unfortunately, this is the case, with many places in the world today. Terrible leaders cause their own people to suffer because of pride and lack of empathy.