Moses: gods and kings and the 10 plagues
PLAGUES OF EGYPT. In commissioning Moses to lead Israel out of Egypt, God had warned him that this would come about only through God’s supreme power overcoming all the might of Pharaoh, whereby Egypt would be smitten with wonders or signs from God (cf. Ex. 3:19–20).
After the sign of the rod that became a serpent and swallowed up those of the Egyptian magicians, which left Pharaoh unmoved, God’s power was demonstrated to him and his people in a series of ten judgments. They were so applied as to portray clearly the reality and power of Israel’s God, and thus by contrast the impotence of Egypt’s gods. The first nine of these plagues bear a direct relation to natural phenomena in the Nile valley, but the tenth, the death of the firstborn, belongs wholly to the realm of the supernatural.
These first nine plagues demonstrate the divine use of the created order to achieve his ends, and recent studies tend to confirm both the reality of what is described in Ex. 7–12 and the powers of accurate, first-hand observation of the narrator of this part of Exodus. The element of miracle in these plagues is usually bound up with their intensity, timing and duration. By far the most painstaking study of the plague phenomena is that by G. Hort in ZAW 69, 1957, pp. 84–103, and ZAW 70, 1958, pp. 48–59. While her treatment of the first nine seems excellent, her attempt to explain the tenth as ‘firstfruits’ instead of first-born is decidedly artificial and unlikely.
Hort has pointed out that the first nine plagues form a logical and connected sequence, beginning with an abnormally high Nile-inundation occurring in the usual months of July and August and the series of plagues ending about March (Heb. Abib). In Egypt too high an inundation of the Nile was just as disastrous as too low a flood.
The first plague (Ex. 7:14–25)
Moses was commanded to stretch his rod over the Nile waters, that they should be ‘turned to blood’; the fish in the river would die, the river stink, and its water be unpalatable; no immediate ending of these conditions is recorded. This would correspond with the conditions brought about by an unusually high Nile. The higher the Nile-flood, the more earth it carries in suspension, especially of the finely-divided ‘red earth’ from the basins of the Blue Nile and Atbara. And the more earth carried, the redder became the Nile waters.
Such an excessive inundation could further bring down with it microcosms known as flagellates and associated bacteria: besides heightening the blood-red colour of the water, these would create conditions so unfavourable for the fish that they would die in large numbers as recorded. Their decomposition would foul the water and cause a stench. The rise of the Nile begins in July/August, reaches its maximum about September, and then falls again; this plague would therefore affect Egypt from July/August to October/November.
The second plague (Ex. 8:1–15)
Seven days later (7:25) Egypt was afflicted by swarms of frogs which, in accordance with God’s promise, died en masse the following day and quickly decayed. That the frogs should swarm out of the river in August was most unusual. The numerous decomposing fish washed along the banks and backwaters of the Nile would pollute and infect the river-shore haunts of the frogs and the frogs themselves, which then came ashore in numbers, heading for the shelter of houses and fields. The sudden death and malodorous and rapid putrefaction of the frogs would indicate internal anthrax (from Bacillus anthracis) as the infection and cause.
The third plague (Ex. 8:16–19)
Hort suggests that this was an abnormal plague of mosquitoes (AV ‘lice’, RSV ‘gnats’), whose already high rate of reproduction would be further encouraged by the specially-favourable breeding-conditions provided by an unusually high Nile.
The fourth plague (Ex. 8:20–32)
The particular ‘fly’ in question here was probably Stomoxys calcitrans. See below on the sixth plague, for which this insect is the likeliest agent.
The fifth plague (Ex. 9:1–7)
A ‘very severe plague’ upon all the Egyptians’ cattle actually in the fields (not all livestock). A cattle pest that affected only the animals out in the fields might indicate that they had contracted anthrax from the infection carried into their fields by the frogs. If the Israelites’ cattle were in their stalls they would not have been affected.
The sixth plague (Ex. 9:8–12)
The *BOILS ‘breaking out in sores’ were probably skin anthrax passed on by the bites of the carrier-fly Stomoxys calcitrans, which breeds in decaying vegetation and would have become a carrier of the disease from the infected haunts of the frogs and cattle. The boils may have affected particularly the hands and feet (Ex. 9:11: the magicians could not stand before Moses; cf. Dt. 28:27, 35), which would be a further clue in favour of the proposed identifications of the disease and its carrier, which would strike by about December/January.
The seventh plague (Ex. 9:13–35)
Heavy hail with thunder, lightning and rain. This ruined the barley and flax, but not the wheat and spelt, which were not yet grown up. This would fit early February. The concentration at this season of this sudden plague in Upper Egypt, but not in Goshen nearer the Mediterranean seaboard, fits the climatic phenomena of these areas.
The eighth plague (Ex. 10:1–20)
The heavy precipitation in Ethiopia and the Sudan which led to the extraordinarily high Nile would also provide favourable conditions for a dense plague of locusts by about March. These, following the usual route, would in due course be blown into N Egypt by the E wind; the ‘west wind’, rûaḥ-yām, is literally ‘sea-wind’; i.e. really a N (or NW) wind, and this would blow the locusts right up the Nile valley. Hort would then emend ‘Red Sea’ (yām sûp̱) to ‘South’ (yāmîn), but this is not strictly necessary.
The ninth plague (Ex. 10:21–29)
The ‘thick darkness’ which could be felt. This was a khamsin dust-storm, but no ordinary one. The heavy inundation had brought down and deposited masses of ‘red earth’, now dried out as a fine dust over the land. The effect of this when whirled up by a khamsin wind would be to make the air extraordinarily thick and dark, blotting out the light of the sun. The ‘three days’ of Ex. 10:23 is the known length of a khamsin. The intensity of the khamsin may suggest that it was early in the season, and would thus come in March. If the Israelites were dwelling in the region of Wadi Tumilat, they would miss the worst effects of this plague.
The tenth plague (Ex. 11:1–12:36)
So far God had demonstrated his full control over the natural creation. He had caused his servant Moses to announce the successive plagues and brought them to pass in invincible sequence and growing severity when the pharaoh ever more persistently refused to acknowledge Israel’s God in face of the clearest credentials of his authority and power. In this final plague came the most explicit sign of God’s precise and full control: the death of the first-born only. Nor did it come without adequate warning (Ex. 4:23); the pharaoh had had every opportunity to acknowledge God and obey his behest, and so had to take the consequences of refusal.
Other aspects
In later days Joshua reminded Israel in Canaan of their mighty deliverance from Egypt through the plagues (Jos. 24:5). The Philistines also knew of them and feared their Author (1 Sa. 4:8). Later still, the psalmist sang of these awe-inspiring events (Ps. 78:43–51).
In Ex. 12:12 God speaks of executing judgments against all the gods of Egypt. In some measure he had already done so in the plagues, as Egypt’s gods were much bound up with the forces of nature. Ha‘pi, the Nile-god of inundation, had brought not prosperity but ruin; the frogs, symbol of Heqit, a goddess of fruitfulness, had brought only disease and wasting; the hail, rain and storm were the heralds of awesome events (as in the Pyramid Texts); and the light of the sun-god Rē‘ was blotted out, to mention but a few of the deities affected.
The account of the plagues is emphatically a literary unity: it is only the total details of the whole and unitary narrative that correspond so strikingly with observable physical phenomena. The mere fragments of plagues that would feature in supposed documentary sources (J, E, P, etc.) and the schematic uniformity of features postulated for these correspond to no known phenomena. Arbitrary adaptation of such partial and stylized accounts into a new and conflated narrative that somehow then happens to correspond exactly to observable phenomena long past and in a distant land is surely beyond serious belief (so Hort). The plainer explanation and the unity of the narrative is to be preferred to a theory which involves unattested phenomena.
K. A. KITCHEN.
Kitchen, K. A. (1996). Plagues of Egypt. In D. R. W. Wood, I. H. Marshall, A. R. Millard, J. I. Packer, & D. J. Wiseman (Eds.), New Bible dictionary (3rd ed., pp. 932–934). Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.
