Oh, as I read on, Murphy is making the book worth it: On Pharaoh and the plagues: “As Egypt’s sources of life and fertility are destroyed, plague by plague, so Pharaoh’s respose rigidifies. Pharaoh is progressively mummified.” She later adds: “The substitution [of Egypt’s firstborn] makes sense if we see Israel’s servitude in Egypt as a kind of death: it is death for death. Israel is lying dead, burdened and weighed down by the pyramids: Egypt has to be sacrificed so that Israel can return to life.” That has significant typological weight, since in the NT Israel herself becomes the “Egypt” that is “sacrificed” for the sake of the nations, the “new Israel.”
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