The Magicians of Egypt were not impostors

That's the first thing you have to understand. When the book of the Exodus presents them before the Pharaoh, he does not treat them like charlatans on a holiday or as cheap tricks on the plaza. He calls them wise men, sorcerers sacred scribes. And during several scenes, he does exactly the same thing as Moses.

To understand why, we have to look at the Egypt of its time with other eyes.

In that world, magic was not a dark art or a forbidden craft. It was call Heka, it was a force as real as the water of the Nile. They even had his own god, Heka, the one that  gaves power to words. An Egyptian text, the Instructions for Merikara,  says that the creator gave magic to men as a weapon to defend himself from the blows of destiny.

Those who practiced it were not marginal. They were reading priests, temple employees, library men who guarded the rituals and formulas. The Hebrew word that Exodus uses for them, “Hartummim”, probably derives from an Egyptian title related to these lecturing priests.

Egyptian literature was full of their own stories.

On a papyrus called Westcar, some three thousand five hundred years ago, a wise wizard called Dyedi again joined the severed head of a goose, a pelican and a ox before King Keops. In another scene, a reading priest called Webaoner models a small wax crocodile, speaks a few words about it and the figurine got  alife and devours an unfaithful lover. Meanwhile, the priest Yayaemankh pours the waters of a lake, half over the other, to recover a lost jewel.

A magician who breaks the waters.

It's hard not to think about what would happen later in the sea at Las Cañas.

So when Moisés and Aaron entered the Pharaoh's palace, they did not face a court of believers. They faced a system of power that had its own theology of prodigy. And did it with a stick.

God said to Moses that, when the pharaon asked for a signal, Aaron, threw his stick into the ground. So he did. And the stick turned into a snake. In reality, the Hebrew word is stronger: tannin, a large creature, a serpentine monster.

The pharaon did not change. He called his wise men.

And each one of them threw his stick into the ground. And each stick turned snakelike.

There are those who have proposed a natural explanation. In Egypt the Egyptian snake lives, and the snake charmers know that, if it is caught with precision on the back of the animal's neck, it falls as rigid as a stick. If you can carry your arm like a stick. Throw it into the ground, wake up. It's a trick that some charming people still practice. But the biblical text doesn't say it was a trick. Say that the magicians did it “with their enchantments”. The ambiguity is deliberate.

And then something happened that nothing expected. Aaron's snake swallowed the magicians.

Think about what that image means to an Egyptian. The snake, the uraeus, was the most important symbol of the Pharaon. Stand in front of him, on the crown, as an emblem of the goddess who protected him and of his power to destroy enemies. A snake devouring the snakes of magicians of the kingdom was not just a superior trick, it was an affront to the throne's own insignia.

But the pharaon did not give up. The text says that your heart has hardened.

The two following pests followed the same script. When Aaron extended his pole over the Nile, the river turned into blood, fish died. The water got dirty. The Egyptians dug wells along the shore to find drinking water. And the wizards did it with their enchantments.

Then the frogs came. They all came out of the river, they entered the houses, the ovens, the beds. And the wizards heard it themselves.

Stick to what that means.

The magicians of Egypt had to appear more quickly. They didn't quit. They never stop. they multiplied them. They were capable of repeating the plague, but not reversing it. The pharaoh, terrified, had to call Moses to pray to his God and make them disappear. The text also has an irony: in Egypt there was a goddess with a head of a frog, Heqet, protector of birth and life, a goddess whose image became a nightmare.

Then I reached the third pest. Dust from the ground converted into mosquitoes, or lice, according to the translations. Aaron hit the ground with his stick and the entire land of Egypt was filled with insects. The magicians tried to imitate him with their enchantments and they couldn’t.

This is the key moment in the story, after two equalized pests, the power of the magicians stopped and his reaction is not a shout of anger, it’s a confession. They told the Pharaón: this is the finger of God.

That phrase, the finger of God, is one of the most enigmatic phrases in the Exodus. This is the first time that someone from the Egyptian band recognizes that what is coming does not belong to the terrain of magic. Later, the same image will appear in Sinai, when the tables of the Law are written with the finger of God. And later on, Jesus would use it in the gospels to explain his own prodigies.

But the pharaoh didn't hear them. His heart remained hardened. The magicians appear one last time, and it is one of the most sobering images of the entire Exodus.

When Moisés launched ashes from the oven to the sky broke out and the Egyptians sprouted ulcers, the magicians could not present themselves before him, because the sores covered them, just like all the Egyptians. The great men of Egypt, those who were equal to the prophet of Israel, could not remain on their feet.

And then, silence. Never appear again. What is curious is that, in the original story, the magicians did not have a name. They are anonymous. But tradition did no support that void.

In a letter from the New Testament, the second to Timothy, mention is made of the men who opposed Moses: Janes y Jambres. In the Qumran manuscripts, the so-called Damascus Document recalls them with similar Hebrew names. Plinio el Viejo, in his natural history, speaks of a certain Jannes among Jewish magicians. A Platonic philosopher of the Second Century, Numenius, the so-called sacred scribes of Egypt, adversaries of Moses. There are even fragments of an apocryphal book, now lost, dedicated to them.

The two magicians who the Bible left without a name ended up being the most famous of the ancient world.

Now, did it really happen?

The honest answer is that there is no Egyptian trace of Moses or the plagues. No papyrus, no inscription. There is a text, the Papyrus of Ipuwer, which laments that the river is bleeding. But it describes social and political chaos, probably several centuries before, and the majority of experts do not consider it a testimony from the plague. Even so, the account of the Exodus is full of authentic Egyptian color. Names, titles, words used, cities, customs. Who wrote it, or transmitted it, knew that world well. And maybe that explains the most disturbing part of the story.

Because magicians were not cartoon, they are worthy rivals. For a while, they were equal to the prophet. Did everything with the same appearance of power. And for this reason the scene had its true strength: it is not about those who know how to do extraordinary things, but about those who can stop them. Imitating a disaster is easy. It's difficult to get rid of it. The magicians of Egypt knew how to multiply frogs what they didn't know was how to get rid of them.

Sources:

Exodus 7:8-13; 7:14-24; 8:1-15; 8:16-19; 9:8-12. Exodus 31:18; Luke 11:20 (el dedo de Dios). 2 Timothy 3:8 (Janes y Jambres). Damascus Document (CD 5:17-19), Qumran. Plinio el Viejo, Historia natural XXX, 11; Numenio de Apamea, cited by Eusebio, Evangelical Preparation IX, 8. Westcar Papyrus (Berlin 3033) and Ipuwer Papyrus (Leiden I 344). Instructions for Merikara (about magic as its creator). Robert K. Ritner, The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, University of Chicago, 1993. Geraldine Pinch, Magic in Ancient Egypt, University of Texas Press, 1994. Nahum M. Sarna, Exodus, JPS Torah Commentary, Jewish Publication Society, 1991. Kenneth A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament, Eerdmans, 2003. Jacques van Dijk and others, works on the apocryphal Janes and Jambres (Chester Beatty XVI and Colony papyri).