Puh-lagues? Puh-lease! (Exodus 5-8)

Correction: I think in my last post I said that Aaron was Moses' son but he's actually his younger, hotter brother.

It's time for Moses to change tactics. Constantly telling the Pharaoh to let his people go is just not working. No wonder. The Pharaoh has no idea who the Lord is since he's from a culture that worships cats (and rightly so). Moses' nagging pisses off the Pharaoh so much that he decides to force his Hebrew slaves to work even harder making bricks.

This is bad. Moses turns to God for an alternative solution. And God is like, "No problem. I've got one: Just tell the Pharaoh to let my people go". Wait - what? Do you know what the definition of insanity is? It's doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to get different results.

Moses feels he's just not being listened to, and he isn't: "Behold, the people of Israel have not listened to me; how then shall Pharaoh listen to me, who am a man of uncircumcised lips?" (Exo 6:12). This is a horrible sounding sentence and frankly, I don't know what it means. I've been sitting here now for a few minutes trying to conjure up a killer female circumcision joke but I've just realized that "female circumcision" and "joke" typically don't go together.

Finally, God "gets" it and suggests that Moses try one of his party tricks to wow the crowd. So Moses chucks a rod down on the ground and it turns into a snake. But - wait. The Pharaoh calls up his bevvy of sorcerers and they duplicate the same trick. Moses must have felt like a big idiot. So Aaron casts his rod over the Nile and it turns to blood, which kills all the fish. What a waste. But at least now they have the Pharaoh's attention.

Next God sends a plague of frogs to Egypt which "shall come into your house, and into your bedchamber and on your bed, and into the houses of your servants and of your people, and into your ovens and your kneading bowls..." (Exo 8:3). No! Not the kneading bowls! But I love delicious bread! This plague of frogs is meant to scare but the Pharaoh's sorcerers bring forth even more frogs using their Harry Potter-esque "secret arts".

This is getting out of hand. The Pharaoh is like, "Enough with the frogs - their tiny carcasses are stinking up the joint". But to drive the point home, God zaps him with a whole bunch of flies. Interestingly, the sorcerers can't figure out the spell for flies (which, you would think would be less challenging than frogs) and the Pharaoh finds himself at God's mercy because flies are really, really annoying unless you have one of those Tilley hats with corks dangling from the brim.