The gods are shut down. They're out of business, if they don't have the priests.
So we could go to Exodus 12, which I usually do. We're at the Passover,
when the death angel, the destroyer is coming.
God says: «this night, I will have victory over the gods of Egypt.»
It wasn't just that night. It was the whole thing, okay,
«on their gods Lord executed judgments», plural.
All the plagues have something to do with this. So let's get into a few of them.
You have the Nile turned to blood in Exodus 7.
I'm not going to go out to all the passages, a lot of these are going to be familiar to you.
Why would that be a big deal?
Who's supposed to maintain the correct working of the Nile?
Who's supposed to maintain "Ma’at"? Pharaoh, Horus incarnate.
So God through Moses turns the Nile into blood. Now we know that the Egyptian priests,
they can't fix this, but they can mimic it. And they do, they make it worse. Oops.
That doesn't show that they're in control.
It shows that all they can do is take Yahweh's judgment,
the God of the Hebrews, and magnify it.
Frogs are next, this is an attack on the goddess Hekhet.
Responsible for the control, specifically, of multiplication of the frogs in the Nile.
You've too many frogs it was a problem for various ecosystem reasons.
And so the Egyptians had a goddess they believe was assigned to this
particular aspect of the Nile's Ma’at functioning.
So Hekhet is not on the job.
Of course, Pharaoh, everybody's looking at him because he's the one
supposed to maintain all this.
The gnats and the flies. Now, Herodotus makes an interesting comment
about Egyptian priests that factors into the gnats and the flies plague.
He says: «[Egyptian priests] shave the whole body every other day,
that no lice or aught [or anything] else that is foul may infest them
in their service of their gods.»
You were ritually unclean in Egypt, if you had lice,
so what the Egyptian priests would do was they would shave their entire body
every other day, just to make sure the lice didn't have a place to snuggle.
And again, to get rid of the lice, so that, why? Are they just clean freaks?
No, they do it so that they are able to go in to the temples,
all across the land, and do their daily priestly function.
In Egypt in every morning, this is why temples were oriented to the east,
you would open the doors of the temple, the sun would rise and shine in,
it would actually shoot a beam of light through the temple,
through the corridors of the temple, and the priests would open up all the doors.
And at the end of the row, at the end of the hallway, these long Hypostyle halls,
there would be an object. Ok, either a figure of a deity,
in some cases it was the sacred bark, the ship that Egyptians thought
transported Ra across the sky every day.
There's something at the end of the road there, the end of the hall,
in the Egyptian Holy of Holies, so to speak, and it was made of gold.
And so the sun would hit it and illuminate the interior of the temple.
Okay, they would do this every morning. And they did other things as well.
But for the Egyptian priests to perform their functions in temples...
Temples were sacred space. They could not have lice.
They couldn't have other physical defects as well. So if everybody is plagued
with gnats and flies, and again, one of those terms you could translate as lice.
We've got a big problem if we're Egypt, our priests can't maintain order.
They can't feed the gods their daily offerings. They can't open the doors of the temples
to show that the presence of the Deity is there in the object,
illuminating the temple and the land.
The gods are shut down. They're out of business, if they don't have the priests.
And so by extension, this is crippling the worship of the false gods of Egypt.
It's a real slap in the face.