Keluaran 3:11

3:11 Moses said ¹  to God, ²  “Who am I, that I should go ³  to Pharaoh, or that I should bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”

Keluaran 8:7

8:7 The magicians did the same ⁴  with their secret arts and brought up frogs on the land of Egypt too. ⁵ 

[3:11]  ¹ tn Heb “And Moses said.”

[3:11]  ² sn When he was younger, Moses was confident and impulsive, but now that he is older the greatness of the task makes him unsure. The remainder of this chapter and the next chapter record the four difficulties of Moses and how the Lord answers them (11-12, 13-22; then 4:1-9; and finally 4:10-17).

[3:11]  ³ tn The imperfect tense אֵלֵךְ (’elekh) carries the modal nuance of obligatory imperfect, i.e., “that I should go.” Moses at this point is overwhelmed with the task of representing God, and with his personal insufficiency, and so in honest humility questions the choice.

[8:7]  ⁴ tn Heb “thus, so.”

[8:7]  ⁵ sn In these first two plagues the fact that the Egyptians could and did duplicate them is ironic. By duplicating the experience, they added to the misery of Egypt. One wonders why they did not use their skills to rid the land of the pests instead, and the implication of course is that they could not.