Listening, Wisdom and Action

(1) And Moshe answered and said: ‘But, behold, they will not believe me, nor listen to my voice; for they will say: Ad-nai has not appeared to you.’ (2) And Ad-nai said to him: ‘What is that in your hand?’ And he said: ‘A staff.’ (3) And He said: ‘Cast it on the ground.’ And he cast it on the ground, and it became a snake; and Moshe fled from before it. (4) And Ad-nai said to Moshe: ‘Put forth thy hand, and take it by the tail—and he put forth his hand, and laid hold of it, and it became a rod in his hand— (5) that they may believe that Ad-nai, the God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has appeared to you.’

(10) So Moses and Aaron came before Pharaoh and did just as Ad-nai had commanded: Aaron cast down his staff in the presence of Pharaoh and his courtiers, and it turned into a tanim. (11) Then Pharaoh, for his part, summoned the wise men and the sorcerers; and the Egyptian magicians, in turn, did the same with their spells; (12) each cast down his staff, and they turned into taninim. But Aaron’s staff swallowed their rods. (13) Yet Pharaoh’s heart stiffened and he did not heed them, as the LORD had said. (14) And Ad-nai said to Moses, “Pharaoh is one of a heavy-heart; he refuses to let the people go. (15) Go to Pharaoh in the morning, as he is coming out to the water, and station yourself before him at the edge of the Nile, taking with you the staff that turned into a nachash. (16) And say to him, ‘Ad-nai, the God of the Hebrews, sent me to you to say, “Let My people go that they may worship Me in the wilderness.” But you have not listened until now. (17) Thus says the LORD, “By this you shall know that I am Ad-nai” See, I shall strike the water in the Nile with the rod that is in my hand, and it will be turned into blood;

(2) O mortal, turn your face against Pharaoh king of Egypt, and prophesy against him and against all Egypt. (3) Speak these words: Thus said the Lord GOD: I am going to deal with you, O Pharaoh king of Egypt, Great Tanim, sprawling in your channels, Who said, My Nile is my own; I made it for myself. (4) I will put hooks in your jaws, And make the fish of your channels Cling to your scales; I will haul you up from your channels, With all the fish of your channels Clinging to your scales.

[Yaakov Tzvi Mecklenburg 18th c. Germany]

Into a tanim - Targum Yonatan Ben Uziel into a hiviah, and according to Rashi, nachash. And in any case it is necessary to make a distinction between a tanim and a nachash. The nachash that Moses' staff became above (4:3) is a snake of the ground, that is found in the forests and deserted places, and tanim is a water snake (vassershlange in Yiddish); as "[In that day the LORD with His sore and great and strong sword will punish] leviathan the slant nachash; leviathan the tortuous nachash; and He will slay the tanin that is in the sea." (Isaiah 27:1) And about Pharaoh it is said: "Great tanim, sprawling in your channels, Who said, My Nile is my own; I made it for myself." Since Pharaoh relied on the waters of the Nile that watered his land, he was compared to a great tanim/water snake that wanders on the Nile, and the proof is that Moses, whose staff became a tanim which can be compared to Pharaoh and his people; and the intention here is a rebuke regarding the plague of blood that changed the water of the river to blood, and the frogs that came from the river. And the wise men of nature [natural history scientists transl.] already said that there are the water snakes [sea snakes, Yiddish Meershlange] and called it [Hidrarkhos] which is 114 feet long, close to 57 amot, as we see in the Mechilta of Shimon Bar Yochai... "the nachash is in the dry land, and this one grows in the land and that one (tanim) grows in the water, etc."