By Stephen Beale, Catholic Exchange - Plagues have a way of stripping away what is superfluous, revealing the naked truth… In the biblical account of the plagues that decimated Egypt, the plagues exposed the civilization’s false gods and their utter impotence in the face of the one true God… That might not be obvious from the text. On the surface, it seems like a clash between pharaoh and Moses, who has God on his side. The clue is in the plagues themselves. Bloody water, boils, hail, and locusts, among others, may seem like the perfect things to inflict as plagues. But biblical commentators point out that they have one other thing in common: many of them are used in depictions of the Egyptian gods.