DeMille's "The Ten Commandments" is decidedly different from the way that Jewish families regard them during the celebration of Passover. Hollywood's treatment of the Plagues as portrayed in movies such as Cecil B. The drama of the plagues and their role in the liberation of the Jewish people are remembered during the Jewish holiday of Pesach, or Passover. Ultimately, it took all 10 plagues to convince the unnamed Pharaoh to free all of Egypt's enslaved Hebrews, who then started their exodus back to Canaan. Though Moses asked Pharaoh before each plague for his people's freedom, he continued to refuse. Then he would produce a series of plagues with escalating severity that culminated with the death of every firstborn Egyptian male. First, God would "harden the heart" of the Pharaoh, making him adamantly against the Hebrews' leaving. God promised Moses that he would demonstrate his power to convince Pharaoh, but at the same time, he would be convincing the Hebrews to follow his path. With his brother Aaron (Aharon), Moses asked the Pharaoh to let the people of Israel leave Egypt in order to celebrate a feast in the wilderness to honor their God. ![]() Moses, the son of an enslaved woman who was raised in the palace of the Pharaoh, is said to have been chosen by his God to lead the Israelite people to freedom. ![]() Lives of bitter hardship ensued for 400 years, at one time including a decree from the Pharaoh that all male Hebrew children be drowned at birth. However, the Pharaoh became intimidated by the sheer number of Hebrews in his kingdom and ordered them all to be enslaved. The Torah relates that Hebrews from the land of Canaan had lived in Egypt for many years, and had become numerous under the kind treatment of the kingdom's rulers. In response, the Hebrew God inflicted 10 plagues on the Egyptians in a divine demonstration of power and displeasure designed to persuade Pharaoh to "let my people go," in the words of the spiritual "Go Down Moses." Their leader, Moses (Moshe), asked Pharaoh to let them return to their homelands in Canaan, but Pharaoh refused. Exodus is the second of the first five books of the Judeo-Christian Bible, also called the Torah or Pentateuch.Īccording to the story of Exodus, the Hebrew people living in Egypt were suffering under the cruel rule of the Pharaoh. Archaeology proves that Amenhotep II, if he is the Pharaoh of the Exodus, ruled for about 22 more years.The Ten Plagues of Egypt is a story related in the Book of Exodus. The Old Testament contains many clear references to the deaths of enemy kings, most of them much less important than this pharaoh. This is significant because the death of such an important person would almost certainly have been given special note in the Bible. But this verse does not say that Pharaoh's personal horse, or that Pharaoh himself, drowned in the sea. Exodus 15:19 supports this: "For the horses of Pharaoh went with his chariots and his horsemen into the sea, and the L ORD brought back the waters of the sea upon them." Naturally, the horses and horsemen of Egypt were considered to be Pharaoh's. In Exodus 14:28, the waters cover "all the army of Pharaoh," but Pharaoh himself is not mentioned. These scriptures say nothing of who was drowned. ( Nehemiah 5:13 illustrates how na'ar should be translated: "Then I shook out the fold of my garment.") Therefore, these verses simply say that God shook off the Egyptians, including Pharaoh, from their pursuit of the Israelites. It simply means "shook off" as is mentioned in the margins of many Bibles and in the Brown, Driver & Briggs Hebrew Lexicon. It does not mean "to drown" or "to toss or tumble about as in the water" as some have attempted to assert. In Psalm 136:15, we find that God "overthrew Pharaoh and his army in the Red Sea." The Hebrew word translated here as "overthrew" is na'ar, also found in Exodus 14:27. ![]() The overwhelming biblical and historical evidence is that he did not die with his army in pursuit of Israel. The most conservative scholarship considers that the pharaoh of Egypt at the time of the Exodus ( c.
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