February 22, 2011 – Wisdom 18-19

Fathers Passing Underneath a Cloud.

I am not sure where the cloud will come into play in tomorrow’s reading, but these chapters deal with the story of Exodus and the Hebrews leaving Egypt and the power of God.  The cloud is the one that protected the Hebrews when Egypt came after them and they were backed against the Red Sea.  The part I found most interesting is the description of the Egyptians when they decide to come after them.  Realize that they had just had every first born male die, including Pharaoh’s son.  There would have been a lot of mourning and funerals being done.  The animals were killed as well, so the clean up would have happened with that.  It must have just been a very dark place.  And in the midst of that mourning, the Egyptians still cannot let go of these slaves.  They change their mind and go back after them.  “For while they were still engaged in funeral rites and were mourning at the burials of the dead, They adopted another senseless plan; and those whom they had sent away with entreaty, they pursued as fugitives. For a compulsion suited to this ending drew them on, and made them forgetful of what had befallen them, That they might fill out the torments of their punishment” 19:4-5.  They did not even take the time to bury their dead children before they revert back to this stubbornness and forgetfulness of what they had just been through.  I wonder what their intention was when the army was going out to them.  Where they going to bring them back or were they just going to destroy them.  You would think the anger of the many soldiers who had lost children would have been enough that it would have just been a massacre.