Background: The Exodus Pattern: Moses, Pharaoh, and the Plagues

Opening Hook

Ask your group to name the classic “hero’s journey” pattern from ancient mythology: an extraordinary baby abandoned or exposed, raised by someone of humble status, whose true identity is hidden until a dramatic reveal that finally gives him the power he was always destined for (think Hercules, Oedipus, Romulus and Remus, or Cyrus the Great). Then read Moses’s birth story next to it. It’s not just different — it inverts the pattern point for point. That inversion is the whole key to reading Exodus rightly, and it’s foundational for how Revelation later borrows this same story’s imagery.

The Core Teaching

This session draws on four articles: The story before the Exodus, The story of Moses, The hardening of Pharaoh’s heart, and The plagues in Egypt.

The historical backdrop, briefly. Israel’s story likely intersects with the Hyksos period — Semitic peoples from Canaan who gained control of the eastern Nile Delta by around 1720 BC before being expelled around 1550 BC. Goshen, where Joseph’s family settled, lies in the northeast of Egypt — the eastern Delta, near the Sinai border, the same region as Pithom, Ramses and the route by which Israel eventually left. Worth putting on a map for the group; the geography is half the argument. After the Hyksos expulsion, Egypt’s determination to prevent a second foreign takeover is what drives Pharaoh’s escalating cruelty toward the Israelites who remained.

Pharaoh’s plan fails at every single point, almost as parody. He works the Israelites hard to suppress their numbers; instead they multiply. He orders midwives to kill Hebrew newborns; they defy him and are blessed with families of their own. He orders babies thrown into the Nile; Moses is placed into the Nile in a basket — the same Hebrew word used for Noah’s Ark — and is saved. He wants to prevent the rise of a deliverer; Moses is raised inside Pharaoh’s own household, nursed by his own mother, who is paid by the palace to do it. Even the story’s structure works against Pharaoh: he isn’t named in the text, treated as a background figure, exactly like the unnamed gods he represents — while the story’s actual heroes are named, and are mostly women, and mostly non-Egyptian outsiders (Shiphrah and Puah, the midwives, bear Semitic names).

Moses’s story is a deliberate reversal of every ancient hero myth. Where the typical ancient hero is abandoned as a baby and found by someone of low status, Moses is hidden by a loving mother with careful, ongoing protection, and found by Pharaoh’s own daughter. Where the typical hero’s identity is concealed until a dramatic late reveal, Moses’s identity is known from the very beginning. Where the typical reveal is the turning point that grants the hero his rightful power, Moses’s revealed identity instead gets him into serious trouble, forcing him to flee for his life. And where these myths exist to establish the hero’s own claim to greatness, Exodus goes out of its way to show that the point was never Moses’s greatness — it was God’s provision and control, working through someone who, by every ordinary measure, doesn’t look like hero material: a man with an uncontrolled temper in his youth, refined over forty years of obscurity as a shepherd into “the most humble man on earth,” someone who forgets to circumcise his own son (the one condition of the covenant resting on him) and has to be rescued by his own wife.

The hardening of Pharaoh’s heart — a question worth taking seriously. Is it fair for God to harden Pharaoh’s heart and then punish him for the resulting cruelty? The Hebrew text uses three different words across the narrative — chazaq (to harden or strengthen), qashah (to be hard or severe), and kabad (heavy or weighty) — and the story uses them in a clear order. First Pharaoh’s heart simply “was hard”, and he hardens it himself (8:15, 32; 9:34). Only from the sixth plague on does the text say that God hardened it (9:12; 10:20, 27). The pattern that emerges: God’s hardening didn’t force Pharaoh into evil against his will — it came as a judgment that confirmed the choice Pharaoh had already made, again and again. The clearest evidence: during the plague of hail, Pharaoh first admits he has sinned (Exodus 9:27) — genuine, if temporary, acknowledgment — and then, the moment the hail stops, sins again and hardens his own heart. This is a picture of a man given every opportunity to relent and repeatedly choosing not to, not a puppet with no real agency.

The plagues: pattern and purpose. The first nine plagues fall into three groups of three, each following a consistent rhythm — the first plague in each group begins in the morning with Pharaoh at the Nile; the last in each group comes without warning. The magicians can imitate the first two plagues but not the third, and by the sixth are so afflicted themselves they can’t even appear before Pharaoh. Starting with the fourth plague, God begins drawing a clear distinction between Israel and Egypt — a distinction only Pharaoh had drawn before then. The plagues target Egypt’s gods and its whole national self-understanding (Exodus 12:12), not ordinary Egyptians personally, who are repeatedly warned in advance. Some officials took the warning and sheltered their people (9:20), and when Israel left, a mixed crowd went with them (12:38).

How hard to lean on Egyptian mythology. Some of it is firm ground: the frog goddess Heqet, companion of the potter god Khnum, was associated with birth and new life, and the Nile itself was worshipped. Other details — the myth behind the phrase “the finger of God,” a deity whose one job was protection from locusts — are harder to verify from standard Egyptology, so hold them lightly in the group and don’t let the argument rest on them. It doesn’t need to. The sturdier version carries the whole weight: the plagues systematically dismantled Egypt’s confidence in its own national gods and its Pharaoh’s supposed divine authority, culminating in the death of the firstborn — a direct strike at Pharaoh’s own line of succession and at animal-associated deities whose future, represented by their own firstborn, was now shown to be no future at all.

Two verses, two points, easily swapped: Exodus 12:11 is the one about haste (“eat it in haste, with your belt fastened”); 12:12 is the judgment on Egypt’s gods.

The Passover itself. Before the tenth plague, God introduces Passover — protection from judgment, the origin of the Lord’s Supper, and, notably, open to anyone who wanted to join Israel, not restricted by ethnicity (Exodus 12:43-49). The sign placed on hand and forehead becomes a lasting reminder: God delivered Israel, He is more powerful than every rival claim to power, and His people must not forget it.

Discussion Questions

Understanding the text:

1. Walk through the ways Moses’s birth story deliberately inverts the typical ancient hero pattern. Why might the biblical author have constructed the story this way rather than simply telling it in the “normal” heroic mode?
2. What does the pattern of Hebrew verbs for “hardening” (used for both God and Pharaoh) suggest about the nature of Pharaoh’s own responsibility for his choices?
3. Why does the text draw a sharp distinction between plagues 1-3 (no distinction between Israelites and Egyptians) and plagues 4-9 (a clear distinction drawn)? What’s the significance of that shift?

So what for us: 4. Moses looked like the least likely candidate for the role God gave him — bad temper, forty “wasted” years, a critical lapse in his own covenant obedience. Where do you disqualify yourself from something God might actually be calling you to? 5. Pharaoh had real, repeated opportunities to relent and chose hardness each time. Where in your own life have you mistaken a temporary, convenient acknowledgment of wrongdoing for actual, lasting repentance? 6. Passover was open to anyone who wanted to join Israel, regardless of ethnicity. How does that shape the way you think about who belongs at the table in your own church or small group?

Closing Prayer Prompt

Thank God for choosing to work through unlikely people — a man with a temper, a stutter, and a forty-year detour — rather than obvious heroes, so that His own power, not human strength, gets the credit. Ask Him to soften anywhere your own heart has hardened after a temporary, convenient acknowledgment of sin, and to give you Moses’s kind of hard-won humility.