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[Mother of all]

So, about water turning to blood...

I don’t doubt such a thing has occurred (Exodus), nor do I doubt that it will occur (Revelation) in the future.

My question is, where did/will the blood come from? If “blood is the life of a creature,” then where did this ‘life’ come from?

We’re the waters meant to simply take on the effective appearance and consistency of blood without requiring death of animals (enough to account for the blood), or is this blood being supernaturally produced (not that I doubt the Father could do this)?

I know Revelation speaks of the waters turning to blood to various extents, with simultaneous descriptions that [a certain amount of] marine life dies as well. Does the blood proportionally come from this accompanied marine life die-off?

Not here for symbolic interpretations; I believe the blood is either literal and from some creatures [nearby], or it’s from no creatures and is simply “blood” for all intents, purposes, and appearances.

[jimwalton]

The language is apocalyptic. It was not real blood, but blood red. Kittel writes that in the language of apocalyptic literature, " 'blood' signifies the red color similar to blood, which indicates eschatological terrors in earth and heaven, such as war (Acts 2.19), hail and fire (Rev. 8.7), the changing of water (Rev. 8.8; 11.6; 16.3ff.), the coloring of the moon (Rev. 6.12; Acts 2.20), the judgment of the nations (Rev. 14.20)."

In Joel 3.4 the moon is said to be turned into blood, but it is generally interpreted as the color, not actual blood. See also 2 Kings 3.22.

There are several natural explanations—it's the timing that make it a miracle, like the exact timing of an earthquake could have caused the Jericho wall to fall or a mudslide to back up the Jordan River exactly when the Israelites were crossing.

In 1986, an eruption of gases beneath Lake Nyos in Cameroon caused dissolved iron particles in the lake to mix with oxygen and form iron hydroxide (rust), which turned the water a reddish color.

There is also this picture of China's Yangtze River: http://amazingincredible.blogspot.com/2012/09/chinas-mysterious-river-of-blood.html

Walton, Matthews, and Chavalas write, "The Nile was the lifeblood of Egypt. Agriculture and ultimately survival was dependent on the periodic flooding that deposited fertile soils along the river’s 4132 miles. The obese Hapi, one of the children of Horus, was technically not the god of the Nile, but the personification of the inundation of the Nile. The blood-red coloring has been attributed to an excess of both red earth and the bright red algae and its bacteria, both of which accompany a heavier than usual flooding. Rather than abundant life usually brought by the river, this brought death to the fish and detriment to the soil. Such an occurrence is paralleled in an observation in the Admonitions of Ipuwer (a few centuries before Moses) that the Nile had turned to blood and was undrinkable. The biblical comment of the Egyptians digging down (v. 24) would be explained as an attempt to reach water that had been filtered through the soil."

But then the text says the Egyptian magicians did the same thing (Ex. 7.22). Alan Cole writes, "It’s hard to know what was happening here. One would have thought to reverse the effect would have been more helpful, but doubtless that lay beyond their powers. But if all the water was already blood, what was to reproduce?" Propp adds: "How can they reproduce the miracle if there is no H20 in the country? Some supposed that after the warning, the magicians did their trick before Moses performed the miracle, noting the difference between the two."

It think the best way to apprehend this is to understand that this is an event that the Egyptian magicians were also able to do, and possibly had done, and so Pharaoh was not convinced by Moses’s miracle. What is most instructive is that the magicians were not able to reverse what Moses had done, so their "secret arts" were inferior to the power of God at work in their midst.