throughout, and formally rounded off by Exo 11:9-10 into an inward unity, is found in the nine plagues which the messengers of Jehovah brought upon Pharaoh and his kingdom at the command of Jehovah, to bend the defiant spirit of the king, and induce him to let Israel go out of the land and serve their God. If we carefully examine the account of these nine penal miracles, we shall find that they are arranged in three groups of three plagues each. For the first and second, the fourth and fifth, and the seventh and eighth were announced beforehand by Moses to the king (Exo 7:15; Exo 8:1, Exo 8:20; Exo 9:1, Exo 9:13; Exo 10:1), whilst the third, sixth, and ninth were sent without any such announcement (Exo 8:16; Exo 9:8; Exo 10:21). Again, the first, fourth, and seventh were announced to Pharaoh in the morning, and the first and fourth by the side of the Nile (Exo 7:15; Exo 8:20), both of them being connected with the overflowing of the river; whilst the place of announcement is not mentioned in the case of the seventh (the hail, Exo 9:13), because hail, as coming from heaven, was not connected with any particular locality. This grouping is not a merely external arrangement, adopted by the writer for the sake of greater distinctness, but is founded in the facts themselves, and the effect which God intended the plagues to produce, as we may gather from these circumstances - that the Egyptian magicians, who had imitated the first plagues, were put to shame with their arts by the third, and were compelled to see in it the finger of God (Exo 8:19), - that they were smitten themselves by the sixth, and were unable to stand before Moses (Exo 9:11), - and that after the ninth, Pharaoh broke off all further negotiation with Moses and Aaron (Exo 10:28-29). The last plague, commonly known as the tenth, which Moses also announced to the king before his departure (Exo 11:4.), differed from the nine former ones both in purpose and form. It was the first beginning of the judgment that was coming upon the hardened king, and was inflicted directly by God Himself, for Jehovah “went out through the midst of Egypt, and smote the first-born of the Egyptians both of man and beast” (Exo 11:4; Exo 12:29); whereas seven of the previous plagues were brought by Moses and Aaron, and of the two that are not expressly said to have been brought by them, one, that of the dog-flies, was simply sent by Jehovah (Exo 8:21, Exo 8:24), and the other, the murrain of beasts, simply came from His hand (Exo 9:3, Exo 9:6). The last blow (נגע Exo 11:1), which
