Dear Official Who Took Their Cattle & Slaves Inside,
I write to you with intrigue and a mixture of feelings. You
were a slave owner, somebody who kept a system of oppression in place and
benefitted from the extreme suffering of others. Yet at the same time you were
a human being who had the same choices as many to make in terms of whether you
lived within the status quo and the norms and values of your context or not.
You were an official of Pharaoh and by that I take it you
were some kind of advisor to him during this crisis. In terms of how God
hardened his heart I am wondering if it was done through some hard line
advisors who kept pushing for the most extreme action. It seems from this chapter
that a split was emerging between you officials in terms of how you felt about
it all. People such as yourself seem to be on one side, perhaps urging the more
passive approach whilst others seem to be much more hard-line.
What happened once the Israelite livestock survived and the
Egyptian livestock had died? Whilst it is not stated I would imagine in that
situation, where the Israelites were slaves that their livestock would have
been taken from them. If it wasn’t was it through fear, or did somebody try
that and then the livestock died?
What did you think when Moses and Aaron took the soot from
the kiln? Were they viewed as magicians and sorcerers themselves? I get the
feeling they were which is why Pharaoh seems to have produced his own. I cannot
imagine the scene of horror which the boils were creating. How did it feel for
you? Was the screaming induced almost as bad as the physical pain? Was this the
point you started fearing the Lord, or had it occurred earlier?
I find it interesting in this situation that my holy book
says “the boils afflicted the magicians as well as the Egyptians”. What ethnic
group did the magicians come from? Were they Israelites or from some other
nation? This is something I had not picked up before, that they were not your
own people. Did they initially come to serve the court as entertainers but were
viewed as having other powers too?
When you heard the Lord tell you that he had let you live
what did you think? Did it confuse you? I am confused by the Lord throughout
this whole thing because it seems just as those of you advising Pharaoh to let
the Egyptians go the Lord hardens his heart. As I say earlier I am not sure if
this was done via a set of hard-line advisors. That’s the thing which makes
sense to me, that there was somebody coming up with some really nasty stuff
about the consequences of letting them go which changed his mind. Yet, the Lord
was behind that and the messes with my head.
The hardening of hearts caused untold suffering to people
on both sides of this, slavery continued for longer as well as the Egyptians
going through more suffering. Why? I cannot think of rational explanations.
With the hail thing I find it interesting that God seems to
be exploiting the divisions between you officials by giving you the warning and
seeing who would listen and who would not. Did he do this to measure the
overall feeling in court and see how many people, such as yourself, would
listen and how many were still hard-liners? If so I can see the logic.
Yet it
is something else which makes me angry and makes me question how a loving God
could do this when it caused human and animal death, including the death of
slaves.
You and your family were safe, because you had listened and
taken everybody inside and sought to save as much as you could. I wonder
through this experience did you seek to treat your slaves at home differently?
Did you start to ask them about their God and their traditions? Were you scared
of them and what they might do to you and your family? I also wonder if you
sent as many as possible back to Goshen. Was that like the townships were in
South Africa? Was it a short distance away, like a suburb, and the slaves came
in from there each day to you? Yet, Egypt is a vast land and it could not have
been like that everywhere unless Goshen was a term for ghetto and each town had
one. I wonder if that was the case. It would make sense to me.
You must have felt some kind of relief for taking the right
action. It must also have strengthened your resolve to argue the case to
Pharaoh for letting the slaves go. I wonder if that is why Pharaoh then says he
will let the people go.
I wonder why Moses, who appears to be speaking and doing
the work in this narrative, which is clearly different to the one where Aaron
is the main orator says you do not really believe. Is it because yours seemed
to be a belief of convenience based on fear created by the confusion and pain
of the events rather than a real fear based on a conscious choice to believe? I
find that interesting. That God demands that our belief and awe/ fear of him to
be out of a freely made choice rather than a knee jerk reaction to our
experience. Was there some custom linked to the Wheat harvest that you were
planning for which indicated that you were not ready to follow Israelite
customs and so still following your own gods rather than fearing God? I ask
because the mention of what crops had and hadn’t been destroyed, in brackets
seems rather random.
I notice that after the hail stops the hearts of Pharaoh
and the officials, such as yourself, hardens but on this occasion it is not the
Lord who appears to be hardening the heart. Does this mean that once the crisis
was over the hardliners who remained amongst the officials gave a strong case
which seemed convincing to most of you? What was it that made your own heart
harden? Was it the economic case or what? Too often the hardening of hearts
comes from fear and I wonder what was said to make you scared again?
This letter to you has been longer than most I write, I
guess it is unconsciously allowing me to speak to those leaders in my own world
whose decisions I cannot understand. It is also because yours is another story
which seems vital to understanding the bigger picture yet which is not fully
recorded. The image included is one I found on a wall in the city I live in and
photographed. It seems to describe part of what is going on in your context and
so I am not going to explain it, rather I leave it to speak for itself.
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