Vaera

In the synagogue the Torah is read aloud in a fixed annual cycle of fifty-four weekly portions (parashiyot), one each Shabbat morning, with certain adjacent portions doubled in ordinary years so the sequence fits the calendar. Each portion is named for a distinctive word near its opening and is paired with a haftarah, a reading from the Prophets. The cycle closes and restarts on Simchat Torah. Vaera ('And I appeared', Exodus 6:2-9:35) carries God's renewed promise of redemption and the first seven of the ten plagues visited on Egypt, blood, frogs, lice, wild beasts, pestilence, boils and hail, as Pharaoh's heart hardens.

Vaera opens with God's declaration that He appeared to the patriarchs as El Shaddai but was not known to them by the name YHVH (Exodus 6:3), a verse that became central to later Jewish philosophical and mystical reflection on the different modes in which God relates to humanity across different eras, Ramban reading the distinction as one of degree of manifest providence rather than a claim that the name itself was previously unknown. The escalating plagues, blood, frogs, lice, wild beasts, pestilence, boils and hail, are read by rabbinic commentary, and in a tradition developed further at the Passover seder, as each targeting specific elements of Egyptian religion and economy, the Nile's transformation to blood striking at a river Egyptians worshipped, so that the plagues collectively function as a sustained polemic against Egyptian idolatry rather than arbitrary punishment. Pharaoh's repeated pattern of promising release during each plague's height only to renege once relief comes (Exodus 8:11, 8:28, 9:27-35) is read by commentators as illustrating the difference between fear-driven concession and genuine repentance.

The plague narrative alternates between two different Hebrew idioms for Pharaoh's resistance, one in which Pharaoh's own heart is hardened or hardens itself, and one in which God is said to harden it, a variation source critics read as evidence of two originally separate strands of plague tradition later combined, generally associated with the Priestly and Yahwist sources respectively, though the exact division of individual verses between them remains debated. Traditional Jewish philosophy and commentary instead reads the alternation theologically, generally holding that Pharaoh hardened his own heart through the first several plagues before God's hardening took over as a form of judgement removing his freedom to repent, a sequence discussed at length by medieval Jewish philosophers including Maimonides.

The Torah itself never states in one place that there were exactly ten plagues; the number becomes fixed only through later tradition and liturgy, most visibly the Passover Haggadah's enumeration, while the poetic recollections of the plagues in Psalms 78 and 105 each list a different selection in a different order from the Exodus narrative and from each other, a divergence long noted by biblical scholars studying how the same national memory was retold across different biblical genres.