Exodus 7:23

And Pharaoh turned, and went into his house,.... Turned away from Moses and Aaron, and turned back from the river to which he came, and went to his palace in the city; it being perhaps now about

And Pharaoh turned and went into his house, neither did he set his heart to this also. No JFB commentary on this verse.

He did not seriously consider it, nor the causes or cure of this plague, and was not much affected with it, because he saw this fact exceeded not the power of his magicians.

Exodus 7:23 And Pharaoh turned and went into his house, neither did he set his heart to this also.Ver. 23. Neither did he set his heart.] But to his "iron sinews" he added "brows of brass." To his natural and hereditary hardness, adventitious and habitual.

(23) Neither did he set his heart to this also.—Heb., Neither did he set his heart (i.e., pay attention) even to this. Pharaoh did not lay even this to heart. He passed it over as a slight matter, unworthy of much thought, and “turned, and went into his house. “Probably care was taken to keep him constantly supplied with the well water, which, however brackish, would be sufficient for his customary ablutions. He drank, no doubt, a more generous liquid.

23. turned and went] viz. after his visit to the Nile, v. 15. set his heart … to this] i.e. pay attention to it: a Heb. idiom (like νοῦνπροσέχειν, animum attendere); so Exodus 2 Samuel 13:20 Heb. al. The plague is an intensification of a natural phaenomenon of annual occurrence in Egypt. ‘Still, each year, the water of the river becomes like blood at the time of the inundation. When the Nile first begins to rise, towards the end of June, the red marl brought from the mountains of Abyssinia stains it to a dark colour, which glistens like blood in the light of the setting sun’ (Sayce, EHH., p. 168, writing with personal knowledge of the country). Other observers speak similarly1[119]. The natives call it then the ‘Red Nile.’ The reddish colour continues more or less till the waters begin to abate in October. The water, while it is red, is not unwholesome. Shortly, however, before the redness begins, the Nile (called then the ‘Green Nile’) generally for a few days rises slightly, and becomes green (from decaying vegetable matter brought down from the equatorial swamps), and then it is unwholesome2[120]. [119] e.g. Osburn, Monum. Hist. of Egypt (1851), i. 11 f. (when the rays of the rising sun fell upon the Nile, it had the appearance of a ‘river of blood’; and the Arabs came to tell him that it was the ‘Red Nile’). [120] See further on the annual inundation of the Nile,—which is due to the waters of the Atbara and the ‘Blue Nile’ being swollen by the heavy spring and summer rains in the Abyssinian highlands, and the melting of the mountain snow, and which give the Delta its fertility,—R. Pococke, Descr. of the East (1743), i. 199 f.; Rawlinson, Hist. of Eg. (1881), i. 19–25; Maspero, Dawn of Civil. pp. 22–26; DB. iii. 551, 889; W. M. Mόller in EB. Egypt, § 7, and Nile; Bδdeker, Egypt6 (1908), p. xlv f.As Dillm. says, however, though the recollection of an extraordinary intensification of a genuine Egyptian phaenomenon is the foundation of the narrative, it is not the actual reddening of the Nile at the time of the inundation which the narrative describes, not only because there would be nothing surprising in what was an annual occurrence, but also because of the seven days’ limit of time in v. 25, and because the water of the ‘Red Nile’ is wholesome and drinkable: but the natural local phaenomenon is dissociated from its natural conditions, and transformed into something transcending all experience, by the circumstances under which it is produced, and by the consequences attending it,—the water (including in P even that in domestic vessels) becoming undrinkable, and the fish dying.