12-28-2024, 01:48 AM
Exodus 10 Wrote:8 [Thereupon,] Moses and Aaron were brought back to Pharaoh, and he said to them, "Go, worship the Lord your God. Who and who are going?" 9 Moses said, "With our youth and with our elders we will go, with our sons and with our daughters, with our flocks and with our cattle we will go, for it is a festival of the Lord to us." 10 So he [Pharaoh] said to them, "So may the Lord be with you, just as I will let you and your young children out. See that evil is before your faces. 11 Not so; let the men go now and worship the Lord, for that is what you request." And he chased them out from before Pharaoh.
I just realized something. It sounds like Pharaoh is trying to trip Moses up with a trick question. By asking, "Who and who are going?" it sounds like Pharaoh is trying limit the number of choice to two. But then Moses rises above the question spectacularly by listing every manner of pairs of people so that he is not shackles by Pharaoh's constraints. This makes sense of the "not so"--Pharaoh is refusing to concede his answer, saying first that he will let "you and your young children" go, followed by "not so" and then "you and the men". <-- Is this a reasonable interpretation?