1 First we got the water turning into blood. 2 Then came the frogs, even into "thine ovens" mmm baked frog 3 Lice or maybe gnats, depends on the translation, flying lice? Now we know why pharoah shaved his head, and all this time we just thought he was tryin to be cool. 4 Flies, Dang where's the frogs when you need them? 5 Livestock disease, uh all the cows and camels and donkeys got sick, prolly from all the flies. And even the sheep, "there shall be a very grievous murrain" Oh no! not the murrain! ( It just means 'plague') 6 Boils, really serious zits, maybe piles( look it up) and even on them poor animals that already been murrained, " a boil breaking forth with blains upon man, and upon beast, " Oh no, not a blain! (It just means a sore.) The Moses blues- "Woke up this mornin' had a blain on my brain" 7 Hail, a lot of it. As the farmer sed, "Thayut hail beat the hayull oughta mah cotton, and whut with my animules bein murrained by them blains ah just don't see how we gonna make it this year 'thout Pharoah's subsidies. 8 Locusts. They ate everything that was left from the murrains and blains. It was like the "Grapes of Wrath" even before the Dust Bowl even happened. 9 Darkness, for 3 days. See what happens when the sun don't pay it's lectricalticity bill? 10 Death of the firstborn, even "the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the mill." What she doin behind the mill anyway? And even the firstborn of the beasts. Now it seems that alotta folks shoulda died here. I mean Pharoah was the firstborn of his daddy so shouldn't he be dead too? Anyway that last one is the origin of passover.

Fascinating possibility on the Tenth Plague. I have taught Hebrew for seven years and studied with the author of the best textbook I could find after checking a dozen. (He is also committed to translating correctly, rather than advancing his own beliefs.) He said that the "firstborn" who were killed by the tenth plague has a highly possible translation of "best and strongest." If so, there are at least a couple of diseases that pick out the strong and leave other people alone. The 1918 influenza plague spared the young and elderly and mostly hit people from 20 to 60; and a Soviet genetically-engineered form of anthrax escaped from their Sverdlovsk testing facility during the cold war and all the victims were men--no women--of military age. What's fascinating about this is that in a recent book "Pharaohs and Kings," one of the most interesting books I've ever read, mass graves of Egyptians and animals are mentioned from somewhere near the time of the Exodus and in the right places. The book Pharaohs and Kings readjusts the chronology of Egypt. After doing that, there are striking correlations with what happened during Biblical times--historical references to the king who was later called Saul, Joseph's palace and even a statue of him in his coat of many colors. And a whole lot of other stuff. Full disclosure, I know another Hebrew professor who thinks that Pharaohs and Kings is mistaken, and this other prof has also studied a lot about Egypt and can read some hieroglyphics. BUT it is, as I said above, still highly possible that the "firstborn" translation is correct and that it was a direct and specific miraculous picking-off of only the firstborn.