The Tactics of Kings
בְּטַכְסִיסֵי מִלְחֲמוֹת מְלָכִים בָּא עֲלֵיהֶם, כְּסֵדֶר מַלְכוּת כְּשֶׁצָּרָה עַל עִיר וכו׳
Rashi on Shemos 8:17 (based on the Tanchuma)He [G-d] came upon them with the tactics of kings waging war, according to the protocol of a kingdom besieging a city...
Rashi says something striking about the makkos: they are not just punishments. They are a war.
The Tanchuma lays out one strategic pattern behind that war, and Rashi points us toward it. That alone is worth careful study.
But perhaps there are other layers here as well.
Perhaps the war is not only a sequence of blows. Perhaps it is also a sequence of revelations. Perhaps each makah does not merely strike Egypt, but exposes something about Egypt — what it did, what it worshipped, what it relied on, what it thought it could hide.
That is what I want to explore.
My method is simple. I want to go through the makkos one by one, slowly, and pay attention to what each one seems to target, what language the Torah uses, what earlier scenes it echoes, and what larger pattern begins to emerge.
We do not need to force a perfect scheme from the start.
We can begin more modestly than that.
We can look carefully. We can make associations. We can test them. And then we can see what kind of war this really is.