What Does Exodus 7:11 Mean?

Then Pharaoh summoned the wise men and the sorcerers, and they, the magicians of Egypt, also did the same by their secret arts. Pharaoh's response to Aaron's staff-Serpent sign is to summon his own specialists: wise men (Hebrew: chachamim, people skilled in occult and wisdom knowledge), sorcerers (Hebrew: mekashefim, those who practice sorcery), and magicians (Hebrew: chartumim, specifically the Egyptian class of professional diviners and enchanters).

The three-part description of Pharaoh's counter-team highlights the Egyptian knowledge system's fullest deployment: Pharaoh is bringing all available categories of Egyptian expertise to respond to what Moses and Aaron have done.

The phrase "by their secret arts" (Hebrew: belahatehem, literally "by their flames" or "by their enchantments") describes specific Egyptian magical technique. Egyptian magical tradition was sophisticated and institutionally organized; the hartummim were a recognized professional class in Egyptian society.

Their ability to replicate the serpent transformation is not dismissed by the Exodus text as illusion: within the narrative world, the magicians do something genuinely parallel to what Aaron did. The counter-sign is real, not pretended, which is why Pharaoh is not persuaded by Aaron's sign alone: the Egyptian system can apparently do something equivalent.

The naming of the magicians in 2 Timothy 3:8 as "Jannes and Jambres" reflects Jewish tradition about the identities of Pharaoh's sorcerers who "opposed Moses." Paul uses them as examples of people who "oppose the truth" and whose folly will "become plain to all" the way theirs eventually did in the plague sequence where the magicians could no longer replicate the plagues (Exodus 8:18-19). The tradition of naming the nameless magicians of Exodus 7 persisted in Jewish and early Christian interpretation as a way of giving specific faces to the opposition that resists divine truth-demonstration.