Jesus: From Genesis to Revelation

Day 4: Locusts, Darkness, and the Final Announcement

Reading

Historical Context

The eighth plague – locusts (‘arbeh) – invokes one of the most feared catastrophes in the ancient Near Eastern world. Locust swarms were documented throughout Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Canaanite literature as events of apocalyptic scale. A single swarm could contain billions of insects, darkening the sky and stripping the landscape bare within hours. The Hebrew text describes these locusts with a specificity that reflects lived experience: “They covered the face of the whole land, so that the land was darkened, and they ate all the plants in the land and all the fruit of the trees that the hail had left. Not a green thing remained, neither tree nor plant of the field, through all the land of Egypt” (10:15). The verb vayekhas (“and they covered”) suggests a blanket so thick the earth itself disappeared beneath it. The locusts consume precisely what the hail spared – the wheat and spelt that were not yet mature in 9:32. The sequence is not accidental. God’s judgments are cumulative, each building on the damage of the last.

What makes the locust plague distinct is the reaction it provokes among Pharaoh’s own advisors. Before the locusts arrive, Pharaoh’s servants break rank: “How long shall this man be a snare to us? Let the men go, that they may serve the LORD their God. Do you not yet understand that Egypt is destroyed?” (10:7). The Hebrew haterem teda ki ‘avdah Mitsrayim – “Do you not yet know that Egypt is ruined?” – is extraordinary. The servants are not merely advising caution. They are accusing Pharaoh of willful blindness. The word ‘avdah (“ruined, perished”) is the same root used for the destruction of Sodom. Pharaoh’s own court sees what he refuses to see: the contest is over. Egypt has lost.

The ninth plague – darkness (choshekh) – strikes at the apex of the Egyptian pantheon. Ra, the sun god, was not merely one deity among many. He was the supreme god, the source of light, life, and order, the father of Pharaoh himself. Egyptian theology held that Ra traversed the sky each day in his solar barque, battling the chaos serpent Apophis each night, and rising victoriously each dawn. The daily sunrise was not a natural phenomenon to the Egyptians. It was a theological event – proof that the cosmic order still held. Three days of total darkness – choshekh ‘afelah, darkness that could be felt, a darkness so dense it had physical weight – did not merely inconvenience the Egyptians. It annihilated their most fundamental religious conviction. If Ra could not rise, the cosmos was collapsing. The Hebrew word ‘afelah appears elsewhere only in descriptions of primordial chaos (Job 10:22) and eschatological judgment (Joel 2:2). This is not nighttime. This is uncreation – a return to the tohu vavohu of Genesis 1:2, the formless void before God spoke light into existence.

The announcement of the tenth plague – the death of every firstborn – comes in Exodus 11:4-8 with a solemnity that sets it apart from every preceding judgment. “About midnight I will go out in the midst of Egypt, and every firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sits on his throne, even to the firstborn of the slave girl who is behind the handmill, and all the firstborn of the livestock” (11:4-5). The Hebrew ani yotse betokh Mitsrayim – “I am going out in the midst of Egypt” – uses the first person. This is not a plague sent through Moses or Aaron. God himself will walk through Egypt at midnight. The universality of the judgment is staggering: from the throne room to the mill house, from royalty to slavery, no household is exempt. The firstborn (bekhor) held a position of supreme importance in the ancient Near East – the heir, the continuation of the family line, the one who carried the family’s future. To lose the firstborn was to lose the future itself.

Moses delivers the announcement in a state of anger the text does not soften: “Moses went out from Pharaoh in hot anger” (11:8). The Hebrew bechari ‘af (“in burning of nostril”) is the strongest expression of fury available in biblical Hebrew. Moses is not calm. He is enraged – at Pharaoh’s obstinacy, at the suffering it has prolonged, at the death that is now inevitable. The narrator presents Moses not as a serene prophet above human emotion but as a man who feels the weight of what is coming.

Christ in This Day

The three days of darkness over Egypt are one of the most striking typological anticipations of the cross in all of Scripture. When Jesus hung on the cross, “there was darkness over the whole land” from the sixth hour to the ninth hour – three hours of supernatural darkness at midday (Matthew 27:45). The echo of the ninth plague is unmistakable. In Egypt, three days of darkness preceded the death of the firstborn. At Calvary, three hours of darkness accompanied the death of the Firstborn. Luke records the detail with precision: “the sun’s light failed” (Luke 23:45). The Greek tou heliou eklipontos carries the sense of the sun itself giving out, ceasing to function – the same cosmic collapse the Egyptians experienced when Ra went silent. The darkness at the cross is not metaphor. It is the ninth plague fulfilled – the creation itself convulsing as the Creator’s Son dies.

The announcement of the firstborn’s death reveals the deepest structure of the Passover’s Christological meaning. In Egypt, every firstborn was under the sentence of death – and the only escape was the blood of a substitute. The lamb’s life for the child’s life. Paul identifies Christ as the ultimate firstborn: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1:15). But this Firstborn does not need a substitute. He becomes the substitute. The firstborn of all creation becomes the Passover lamb for all creation. The one who should have been spared is the one who is slain – not because he was under judgment but because he stood in the place of those who were. What Egypt experienced as a threat – “every firstborn shall die” – becomes in Christ a gift: the Firstborn has died, and therefore no one sheltered under his blood need die. The tenth plague and the cross are the same event, separated by fifteen centuries but governed by the same logic: without the shedding of blood, there is no passing over.

Jesus himself connects his ministry to the plague of darkness when he declares, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12). The claim is set against the backdrop of the Feast of Tabernacles, when enormous menorahs were lit in the temple courts – but it resonates with the deeper darkness of the ninth plague, when the entire land of Egypt was swallowed by a darkness that could be felt. Christ is the answer to the ninth plague. Where Ra failed, Christ does not. The light that Egypt lost for three days, the world lost for three hours at the cross – and then, on the third day, the light returned. The resurrection is the sunrise that Ra could never guarantee: permanent, irreversible, the end of every darkness. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).

Key Themes

Connections

Old Testament Roots

Joel 2:1-11 describes a locust invasion in language that deliberately echoes the eighth plague: “A day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness!” The prophet uses the Exodus template to warn Israel that the plagues God once sent against Egypt can fall on his own people if they refuse to repent. The firstborn motif traces back to Genesis, where God repeatedly overturns the rights of the firstborn – Ishmael passed over for Isaac, Esau for Jacob, Reuben for Joseph – establishing a pattern in which the expected heir is displaced and the unexpected one chosen.

New Testament Echoes

The three days of darkness find their fulfillment in the three hours of darkness at the crucifixion (Matthew 27:45; Mark 15:33; Luke 23:44-45) and the three days of Christ’s entombment. Revelation 9:1-3 draws on the locust plague for its imagery of eschatological judgment, with locusts emerging from the abyss. The death of the firstborn is inverted at the cross: in Egypt, the firstborn of the condemned die; at Calvary, the Firstborn of the redeemed dies in their place.

Parallel Passages

Psalm 105:28-36 – “He sent darkness, and made the land dark; they did not rebel against his words. He turned their waters into blood and caused their fish to die.” Amos 4:9-10 – God recounts sending plagues against Israel in the pattern of the Egyptian plagues, warning that refusal to repent invites the same escalation. Wisdom 17:1-18:4 provides an extended Jewish meditation on the ninth plague, contrasting Egypt’s darkness with the light that shone in Goshen.

Reflection Questions

  1. Pharaoh’s own servants see that “Egypt is destroyed” and beg him to relent, yet Pharaoh persists. What does it mean when the evidence of God’s power is visible to everyone except the one most responsible for responding to it? Where have you seen this pattern of willful blindness – in the world or in yourself?

  2. The ninth plague – darkness so thick it can be felt – silenced Ra, the supreme god of Egypt. What happens to a culture when its highest confidence is exposed as empty? How does the gospel speak to people living in the aftermath of failed certainties?

  3. The announcement of the firstborn’s death applies to every household in Egypt – from palace to prison. Judgment makes no distinction between social classes. How does this universal scope shape your understanding of the cross, where the Firstborn of all creation died for people of every station?

Prayer

Lord of light and Lord of darkness, you are the God who commands the locusts and silences the sun, who walks through the land at midnight and spares by blood what justice would consume. We confess that we live in a world of thick darkness – not the darkness of Egypt but the darkness of a creation that groans under the weight of sin and death. Yet you have not left us in the dark. You sent your Son, the light of the world, into the deepest darkness the cross could produce, and on the third day the light returned. As the darkness of Egypt pointed to the darkness of Calvary, let the light of the resurrection pierce every shadow in our lives. We thank you that the Firstborn of all creation became the Passover lamb, that his death is our life, that his darkness is our dawn. Keep us from the hardness of Pharaoh, who saw the evidence and refused the truth. Give us instead the hearts of those who hear your word and flee to shelter. In the name of Jesus, who is the light no darkness can overcome. Amen.