The Seventh Plague of Egypt, hailstones and fire, painted in 1823 by John Martin. The plague is described in Exodus 9:13-35. Martin came from Haydon Bridge near Hexham, moving to London in 1806, where he came to be quite a society figure, on familiar terms with Prince Albert, Charles Dickens and Michael Faraday. He was awarded a medal by Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, and corresponded with Benjamin Disraeli and Charlotte Brontë among others. Cecil B. DeMille, director of ‘The Ten Commandments’ in 1956, is said to have kept Martin’s “Illustrations to the Bible” on his Hollywood desk.
PHARAOH would be as difficult as God had predicted, but Moses’s first problem was the Israelites. On hearing they were to leave Egypt, they downed tools without permission, so Pharaoh ordered them back to work on his building projects, but this time without straw for their bricks. Yet they did not blame Pharaoh. They blamed Moses for interfering.
Moses began to doubt himself, but God sent him back to Pharaoh. “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart,’ he said, ‘and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt.”* And so it proved: Moses threw down his staff and it duly turned into a serpent, but Pharaoh’s magicians did the same, and even though Moses’s snake swallowed up theirs, Pharaoh remained unmoved.
Moses turned the Nile to blood for a week; he brought frogs and lice and flies on Egypt; he brought disease upon their herds; he brought boils and pestilence, hailstones and fire, locusts, and thick darkness. But Pharaoh would not let Israel go.
Note that God did not force Pharaoh to do evil, and then blame him for the evil he had done. St Isaac the Syrian tells us that some hearts are like wax, and some like clay: the sun’s warmth softens wax hearts, and bakes clay hearts hard – yet it is the same impartial, fair, life-giving sunshine that does both. What dried out Pharaoh’s clay-like heart was the sight of the wonders that God did for Israel – the very same sight that melts so many more gentle hearts. Happily, wax hearts are available just for the asking: see Ezekiel 18:31-32 and Psalm 51:10.
