LET MY PEOPLE GO, THAT THEY MAY SERVE ME

  Ex.8:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, Go unto Pharaoh, and say unto him, Thus saith the LORD, Let my people go, that they may serve me.

The plague of Frogs, or the second plague, also proceeded from the Nile, and had its natural origin in the putridity of the slimy Nile water, whereby the marsh waters especially became filled with thousands of frogs. צְפַרְדֵּעַ is the small Nile frog, the Dofda of the Egyptians, called rana Mosaica or Nilotica by Seetzen, which appears in large numbers as soon as the waters recede. These frogs (הַצְּפַרְדֵּעַ in Exo_8:6, used collectively) became a penal miracle from the fact that they came out of the water in unparalleled numbers, in consequence of the stretching out of Aaron's staff over the waters of the Nile, as had been foretold to the king, and that they not only penetrated into the houses and inner rooms (“bed-chamber”), and crept into the domestic utensils, the beds (מִטָּה), the ovens, and the kneading-troughs (not the “dough” as Luther renders it), but even got upon the men themselves

Exo 8:20  And the LORD said unto Moses, Rise up early in the morning, and stand before Pharaoh; lo, he cometh forth to the water; and say unto him, Thus saith the LORD, Let my people go, that they may serve me. 

Exodus 8:20-32

As the Egyptian magicians saw nothing more than the finger of God in the miracle which they could not imitate, that is to say, the work of some deity, possibly one of the gods of the Egyptians, and not the hand of Jehovah the God of the Hebrews, who had demanded the release of Israel, a distinction was made in the plagues which followed between the Israelites and the Egyptians, and the former were exempted from the plagues: a fact which was sufficient to prove to any one that they came from the God of Israel. To make this the more obvious, the fourth and fifth plagues were merely announced by Moses to the king. They were not brought on through the mediation of either himself or Aaron, but were sent by Jehovah at the appointed time; no doubt for the simple purpose of precluding the king and his wise men from the excuse which unbelief might still suggest, viz., that they were produced by the powerful incantations of Moses and Aaron

Exo9:1 Then the LORD said unto Moses, Go in unto Pharaoh, and tell him, Thus saith the LORD God of the Hebrews, Let my people go, that they may serve me. 

The fifth plague consisted of a severe Murrain, which carried off the cattle (מִקְנֶה, the living property) of the Egyptians, that were in the field. To show how Pharaoh was accumulating guilt by his obstinate resistance, in the announcement of this plague the expression, “If thou refuse to let them go” (cf. Exo_8:2), is followed by the words, “and wilt hold them (the Israelites) still” (עֹוד still further, even after Jehovah has so emphatically declared His will)

Exo 9:13  And the LORD said unto Moses, Rise up early in the morning, and stand before Pharaoh, and say unto him, Thus saith the LORD God of the Hebrews, Let my people go, that they may serve me. 

As the plagues had thus far entirely failed to bend the unyielding heart of Pharaoh under the will of the Almighty God, the terrors of that judgment, which would infallibly come upon him, were set before him in three more plagues, which were far more terrible than any that had preceded them. That these were to be preparatory to the last decisive blow, is proved by the great solemnity with which they were announced to the hardened king (Exo_9:13-16). This time Jehovah was about to “send all His strokes at the heart of Pharaoh, and against his servants and his people” (Exo_9:14). אֶל־לִבְּךְ does not signify “against thy person,” for לֵב is not used for נֶפֶשׁ, and even the latter is not a periphrasis for “person;” but the strokes were to go to the king's heart, “It announces that they will be plagues that will not only strike the head and arms, but penetrate the very heart, and inflict a mortal wound” (Calvin). From the plural “strokes,” it is evident that this threat referred not only to the seventh plague, viz., the hail, but to all the other plagues, through which Jehovah was about to make known to the king that “there was none like Him in all the earth,;” i.e., that not one of the gods whom the heathen worshipped was like Him, the only true God. For, in order to show this, Jehovah had not smitten Pharaoh and his people at once with pestilence and cut them off from the earth, but had set him up to make him see, i.e., discern or feel His power, and to glorify His name in all the earth (Exo_9:15, Exo_9:16). In Exo_9:15 וגו שָׁלַחְתִּי (I have stretched out, etc.) is to be taken as the conditional clause: “If I had now stretched out My hand and smitten thee...thou wouldest have been cut off.” הֶעֱמַדְתִּיךְ forms the antithesis to תִּכָּהֵד, and means to cause to stand or continue, as in 1Ki_15:4; 2Ch_9:8 (διετηρήθης lxx). Causing to stand presupposes setting up. In this first sense the Apostle Paul has rendered it ἐξήγειρα in Rom_9:17, in accordance with the purport of his argument, because “God thereby appeared still more decidedly as absolutely determining all that was done by Pharaoh” (Philippi on Rom_9:17). The reason why God had not destroyed Pharaoh at once was twofold: (1) that Pharaoh himself might experience (הַרְאֹת to cause to see, i.e., to experience) the might of Jehovah, by which he was compelled more than once to give glory to Jehovah (Exo_9:27; Exo_10:16-17; Exo_12:31); and (2) that the name of Jehovah might be declared throughout all the earth. As both the rebellion of the natural man against the word and will of God, and the hostility of the world-power to the Lord and His people, were concentrated in Pharaoh, so there were manifested in the judgments suspended over him the patience and grace of the living God, quite as much as His holiness, justice, and omnipotence, as a warning to impenitent sinners, and a support to the faith of the godly, in a manner that should by typical for all times and circumstances of the kingdom of God in conflict with the ungodly world. The report of this glorious manifestation of Jehovah spread at once among all the surrounding nations (cf. Exo_15:14.), and travelled not only to the Arabians, but to the Greeks and Romans also, and eventually with the Gospel of Christ to all the nations of the earth (vid., Tholuck on Rom_9:17).

Exo 10:3  And Moses and Aaron came in unto Pharaoh, and said unto him, Thus saith the LORD God of the Hebrews, How long wilt thou refuse to humble thyself before me? let my people go, that they may serve me. 

As Pharaoh had acknowledged, when the previous plague was sent, that Jehovah was righteous (Exo_9:27), his crime was placed still more strongly before him: “How long wilt thou refuse to humble thyself before Me?” (לֵעָנֹת for לְהֵעָנֹת, as in Exo_34:24).

Exo 10:4  Else, if thou refuse to let my people go, behold, to morrow will I bring the locusts into thy coast: 

to-morrow will I bring the locusts — Moses was commissioned to renew the request, so often made and denied, with an assurance that an unfavorable answer would be followed on the morrow by an invasion of locusts. This species of insect resembles a large, spotted, red and black, double-winged grasshopper, about three inches or less in length, with the two hind legs working like hinged springs of immense strength and elasticity. Perhaps no more terrible scourge was ever brought on a land than those voracious insects, which fly in such countless numbers as to darken the land which they infest; and on whatever place they alight, they convert it into a waste and barren desert, stripping the ground of its verdure, the trees of their leaves and bark, and producing in a few hours a degree of desolation which it requires the lapse of years to repair.

            

  1,000 year old Exodus Verses Found.

Nov. 9, 2007 news of a man who had a 1,000 year old manuscript fragment of the Hebrew Bible! For 60 years he thought of it as his good luck charm.

"...is believed to be part of the most authoritative manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, the Aleppo Codex", said Michael Glatzer, academic secretary of the Yad Ben Zvi institute. It contains verses from the Book of Exodus describing the plagues in Egypt, including the words of Moses to Pharaoh, "Let my people go, that they may serve me."

Sam Sabbagh, then a 17-year-old Syrian, picked up this piece off the floor of a synagogue in Aleppo, Syria in 1947. It had been burned the previous day in riots that followed the decision by the United Nations to partition Palestine, a step to creation of the Jewish state of Israel.

"We have only about 60 percent of the codex -- more than a third is still missing," said Aron Dotan, professor of Hebrew and Semitic languages at Tel Aviv University. The missing part includes most of the Torah, or Pentateuch, he said. The codex comprised the books of the Old Testament..."