Parshas Vaera - The Order of the Plagues

We all know the names of the ten plagues that struck Egypt. And some of us may even remember the order that they took place in. But is there any reason for the particular order?

The plagues do become somewhat more devastating with time, but not entirely.

Take the plague of darkness, which was traumatic, but not truly damaging, as opposed to the invasion of wild beasts.

There is however an order of meaning to the order of plagues.

The plagues don't necessarily move forward in degrees of devastation, but in degrees of altitude.

From the first to the ninth plague, they begin at the very bottom, in the river, below the surface of the earth, and ascend to the sky, while the final plagues leading up to the end, hail, locusts, and darkness, emerge from the heavens.

In between them, the plagues slowly ascend, rising from the Nile, blood and frogs, up to the third plague, vermin, which arise when the dust of the earth is struck. The fourth and fifth plagues involve the animals, either wild animals invading or domestic animals dying, on the surface of the earth.

Then for the sixth plague, furnace ash is tossed "heavenward", and becomes boils.

The seventh plague, hail, falls from he heaven to the earth. The eight plague, locusts, likewise, descend from the heaven to the earth. But the ninth plague, darkness, blots out light across the heavens cutting off light to Egypt.

From the first to the ninth plague, the plagues rise from below the earth, to the earth, and then to the sky, moving upward from man and into the very heavens, demonstrating that G-d rules over the earth and the heavens, that He is the G-d of all creation.

And then, for the tenth plague, the damage is focused on the pinnacle of creation, the beings for whom all the earth and the heavens had been meant for, man, in his religious duty.

We are told that in the tenth plague, G-d visited devastation on the gods of Egypt.

How did He do this by slaying the first-born sons of Egypt? The first-born sons were traditionally the religious leaders of the family. They were the priests. Instead of serving G-d, they had served idols, instead of permitting the Jews to worship G-d, they had enslaved them to serve their idolatrous society.

And so, after demonstrating that the providence of G-d rises from below the earth to the heavens, directing the gaze of Egyptians upward from their provincial affairs, their property, their comfort, their homes, to the heavens, one final plague was unleashed to break their idolatrous society.

Each Egyptian refusal to contemplate the power of G-d, after each increasingly profound plague, was finally punished with the destruction of their gods, who, unlike G-d, were mere objects whose understanding and existence lived only in the priests who worshiped them, the first-born.

The final message of the ten plagues was there was no other G-d, in earth or in heaven.