Aaron

Aaron is named as Moses’ brother and fellow agent in the Exodus, a figure through whom God’s people are reclaimed from Egyptian bondage and restored to the land promised to Abraham’s seed. His significance is less a developed personal character arc than a precise place within the sacred history Raphael unfolds to Adam: Aaron belongs to the generation that converts divine commission into public deliverance, political organization, and covenantal law.

Identity and Historical Placement

Aaron enters the narrative during Michael’s account of the descendants of faithful Abraham. Abraham’s grandson leaves Canaan with twelve sons and travels to Egypt during a famine, where the family grows into a nation. A later Egyptian king, alarmed by their numbers, turns them from invited guests into slaves and orders the killing of their infant males. Against this oppression, God sends two brothers, Moses and Aaron, to claim the enslaved people and bring them back toward their promised land.

Role in the Exodus

Aaron’s stated role is shared with Moses rather than separately dramatized. The brothers are sent by God to confront the tyrant and demand the release of Israel. Their mission is backed by a sequence of signs and judgments: the rivers become blood, frogs, lice, and flies invade the palace and land, cattle die of disease, bodily afflictions spread, hail and fire devastate the Egyptian fields, locusts consume what remains, and darkness covers the country for three days. The death of Egypt’s firstborn finally compels the ruler to let the sojourners depart.

The Exodus is nevertheless marked by reversal. The Egyptian king repeatedly hardens his heart after temporary submission and pursues the departing people. God guides Israel through a cloud and a pillar of fire, while Moses’ rod divides the sea so that the chosen race crosses between walls of crystal-like water. When the pursuing army follows, the waters return and overwhelm it. Aaron therefore belongs to the divinely ordered leadership that transforms captivity into escape, while the signs and judgments establish that the liberation is God’s work rather than a merely human revolt.

Relation to Moses and Sacred Mediation

Aaron’s presentation is inseparable from Moses. The two brothers are described together as the messengers sent from God, and the account later gives Moses the public responsibility of reporting God’s will when the people fear the divine voice at Sinai. In this larger pattern, Aaron’s association with Moses places him within a chain of mediation: divine command passes through chosen human agents to a people who cannot bear direct revelation without terror.

After the sea crossing, Israel does not immediately enter Canaan by the shortest route. The people travel through the wilderness, where they establish government, select a senate through the twelve tribes, and receive laws at Mount Sinai. Moses is specifically named as the mediator who introduces the greater future Mediator, but Aaron’s earlier partnership with him binds Aaron to the same transition from miraculous rescue to ordered communal life. His function thus links deliverance with the formation of a people governed by divine law.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

Aaron’s brief appearance concentrates several of the poem’s governing oppositions: slavery and freedom, tyranny and legitimate rule, fear and faithful obedience, and human political action and divine providence. The Egyptian ruler treats a growing people as a threat and converts hospitality into bondage; God answers that coercive power through signs, judgment, guidance, and the eventual destruction of the pursuing host. Aaron stands on the side of a freedom that is not lawlessness, since Israel’s rescue leads to government and laws ordained by God.

His place in the account also reinforces the poem’s wider argument about free service. Raphael has explained that obedience is acceptable only when it is voluntary, and the Exodus narrative gives that principle historical form: Israel is removed from imposed servitude so that it may become a covenant people capable of ordered obedience. Aaron is therefore a representative of commissioned service, standing in contrast to Satan’s rebellion against rightful sovereignty and to the Egyptian tyrant’s attempt to possess another people by force.

Place in the Prophetic History

Michael’s history moves from Abraham’s call through Egypt, the plagues, the crossing of the sea, the wilderness, and Sinai toward the later promise of redemption. Aaron belongs to the earlier stage of that movement, before the law’s ceremonies are interpreted as shadows of the coming deliverer. His mention helps establish continuity between the patriarchal promise, the national deliverance of Israel, and the later work of the Messiah, through whom the deeper bondage of sin and death will be overcome.

The character consequently has a structural importance disproportionate to the few lines devoted to him. Aaron is named at the threshold between family and nation, captivity and freedom, miracle and law. Through him, together with Moses, the poem shows how a divinely promised people is gathered, rescued, guided, and prepared for a history whose final meaning lies beyond the Exodus itself.