Moses left with the clearly expressed warning that the king might not then know Jehovah, but that he was certainly destined to find out about Him! The call to arms, the challenge to combat, and the prophecy of God’s victory are all expressed in the single verse in Exodus the seventh chapter, where God tells Moses that “the Egyptians shall know that I am Jehovah, when I stretch out my hand upon Egypt....” This, then, was the primary reason for the ten plagues. God would teach the Egyptians a lesson through judgments that the land would never forget! When he finished with them, none were ever again able to say, “And who is this Jehovah? The gods of Egypt are stronger.”
Thus we see that the contest was primarily between the monotheism of Israel and polytheism of Egypt. We would emphasize the fact that the Egyptians were perhaps the most polytheistic race the world has so far known. It is impossible to say just how many deities existed to the Egyptian mind, but “their name was legion”! Two hundred separate deities are named in the Pyramid Text, and four hundred and eighty more are named in the Theban Recension of the Book of the Dead. Altogether, archeologists have recovered the names of over two thousand two hundred different gods and goddesses that were worshipped by the Egyptians! Is it any wonder that Jehovah must start His laws to His people with the commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me!”?
A word about these objects of Egyptian worship will be necessary to clear up the necessary later references to the practices and the beliefs of the Egyptians. While these ancient folks never had the idea of an immanent, pervasive God, in the monotheistic sense, they still had a dim conception of a super-god principle, behind and over the various individual gods and goddesses. There was first of all the grouping of gods into triads, which was a widely accepted custom. Since each triad consisted of a god, a wife, and a son, this grouping is less a degeneration of the principle of the Trinity than might seem to be suggested at first thought. Rather, it was a glorification of the family principle.
Thus we see that at Thebes, the principal triad of deities consists of Amon-Ra, the king of all the gods, Mut, his Wife, and Khons, their son.
Ba-neb-Ded, with his wife Het-mehit, and their son Harpakhrad (whom the Greeks later called Harpokrates) constituted the triad at Mendes. In like manner, the Memphis triad was composed of Ptah, Sekhmet, and Imhotep. Sometimes the greater gods were grouped into a company of nine, called the Ennead. There was also the grouping of the major deities into the “Three Companies,” being the gods of the heaven, the earth, and the Other or Under World.
All the gods had human bodies, but some of them had animal heads. Sometimes a god who customarily had a human head would appear wearing the animal head of his theophany, as in the case of Hathor, cited above. Thus when Hathor appears with a cow’s head upon a human body, she appears with the solar disk between her horns; and when she appears with the human head, she wears as a headdress the bonnet of the goddess Mut, the wife of Amon-Ra, the horns of the cow, the solar disk which shows her relationship to Horus, and the feather of the goddess Maat.
We have previously asserted that each plague was a direct blow at one of these celestial beings, and it might be profitable to demonstrate this fact with a few concrete illustrations.
Hapi
The First Plague was a direct and definite blow at a numerous company of these objects of worship. In the first place, the River Nile was itself an object of worship. It was reputed to flow from the celestial stream called Nu, and was heavenly in its origin. It brought life to the entire land of Egypt, and was worshipped with appropriate and very exact ritual. There were hymns to the Nile, prayers and offerings to and for the Nile, and the river possessed in itself a very real personality. The River is pictured in the form of a man wearing a cluster of water plants upon his head, and the idea of fertility is conveyed by giving him the heavy pendant breasts of a nursing mother! In the British Museum may be seen a remarkable papyrus, containing the Hymn to the Nile. To show the reverence felt for the power of the great River, we quote just a sentence or two from this Hymn: