Something happened to me not long ago that may explain a bit of Moses’s magic. I wonder if your readers have any new light to shed on this natural explanation for a Biblical “miracle.”
As BAR readers will no doubt recall, when Moses and Aaron his spokesman confront Pharaoh and ask him to allow the Israelites to leave Egypt, Moses demonstrates his power by having Aaron, pursuant to God’s instructions, cast a staff onto the ground. The staff immediately turns into a serpent. Pharaoh summons his wise men, sorcerers and magicians, who are able to perform the same trick. However, Aaron’s staff-turned-snake swallows the staffs-turned-snakes of the Egyptians (Exodus 7:8–12).
The incident I wish to relate occurred while I was gardening at a friend’s house in a seaside village in Israel.
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Opening the door of the toolshed, I saw a tail disappearing behind a sack lying in the back. Thinking it was a rat, I raised my spade to hit it as I picked up the sack. But when I picked up the sack, a snake reared up. I tried to cut its head off with the spade against the wall, but the wall was very rough and I could only trap and hold the snake. So I wedged the handle of the spade with a brick and went to get help from a neighbor whose house, it happened, was being sprayed against mosquitoes. The man doing the spraying told me that he was also a snake expert, so I took him along. His reaction was that the snake should be examined, and killed only if it was poisonous. Of course, I was interested to see how he was going to set about finding out if the snake was poisonous. So I watched him carefully.
He caught the tail of the snake, released its head and swung it around his head a number of times. He then carried it to the lawn. In his hand it looked like a thick twig, a stick. The snake was laid down and it looked more than ever like a stick, quite lifeless. The young man opened the snake’s jaws, pointed out to me its poison fangs and chopped its head off. We then buried it.
I asked the young man what would have happened if he had not cut its head off. He replied that it would have regained consciousness and behaved normally.
This of course reminded me of the staffs that turned into snakes in Exodus, so I pursued the matter with the young man. He told me that as a boy he used to catch snakes this way. It was dangerous, however, because different snakes, even of the same species, took different times to regain consciousness. Occasionally the time lapse was so short that the snake managed to bite its captor.
Thinking this over, I concluded that Moses and the Egyptians may have chosen particular snakes after some experimentation, finally selecting only those snakes that remained unconscious for a rather long and predictable time. By throwing the stiffened, unconscious snakes on the ground at the right time, Moses and Pharaoh’s magicians were able to bring the snakes back to consciousness.
When I re-examined my Bible with this in mind, I found some confirmation for this theory. In Exodus 4, Moses is speaking to God. Moses is fearful. What if Pharaoh does not believe him? So God gives Moses a bit of magic to perform to impress Pharaoh. Moses throws down his staff, which becomes a snake:
“Thus the Lord said to Moses, ‘Put out your hand and grasp it [the snake] by the tail.” He put out his hand and seized it and it became a staff in his hand.”
(Exodus 4:3).
Here is a clear suggestion that the snake became a staff when Moses grasped it by the tail—and probably swung it around his head. Here we have God explaining the trick to Moses.
I wonder if BAR readers can shed any new light, support, contradiction, etc., on this matter.
Something happened to me not long ago that may explain a bit of Moses’s magic. I wonder if your readers have any new light to shed on this natural explanation for a Biblical “miracle.” As BAR readers will no doubt recall, when Moses and Aaron his spokesman confront Pharaoh and ask him to allow the Israelites to leave Egypt, Moses demonstrates his power by having Aaron, pursuant to God’s instructions, cast a staff onto the ground. The staff immediately turns into a serpent. Pharaoh summons his wise men, sorcerers and magicians, who are able to perform the same trick. […]
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