Take your flocks and herds, as you have said, and go. And also bless me. Even the livestock Pharaoh withheld in the last negotiation are now released without condition: as you have said. Not a hoof left behind, as Moses promised in Exodus 10:26. But then, unexpectedly: and also bless me. Pharaoh, surrounded by death, asks for the blessing of the God he has spent ten plagues refusing. The request is plaintive and perhaps genuine in its desperation — the man who has lost his son reaching out to the only power that could matter now. Genesis 12:3 promised that God would bless those who bless Abraham and curse those who curse him. Pharaoh has done both — he has used Israel's labor and destroyed their sons — and now at the end he asks for the blessing he has forfeited. It is too late for the firstborn. Perhaps it is not too late for the request.

COMMUNITY REFLECTIONS

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