A Tale of Two Scales

As I continue to work on a historical novel reimagining the Exodus, I’ve been contemplating the experience of the Ten Plagues from a point of view not much considered in the Hebrew Bible: that of the average Egyptian.

The impact of natural disasters on a society is dictated in large measure by how it constructs a common understanding of reality. Before the age of science, that understanding was dominated by religion. Egypt worshiped a pantheon of deities, and many of us are familiar with some of them. But it’s the more dedicated Egyptophiles among us who are aware that “the foundation for the entire civilization” of ancient Egypt was ma’at, translated as “harmony and balance.” Ma’at was also the name of a goddess who judged the dead by placing every soul’s heart on one side of a divine scale, and an ostrich feather on the other. If the heart was heavy with sin, it would be devoured by a monster and the soul would be extinguished forever.

Assuming the story of the Ten Plagues has an essential foundation in fact, the Egyptian populace — for whom ma’at was both an article of faith comparable to the Christian idea that the son of God died on the cross, and a guide to right living similar to the Ten Commandments — would have been shaken to their core by this succession of frightening events. Their trust in Pharaoh, who had a responsibility to maintain ma’at in his own life and throughout society, would have been severely compromised. Why, it would have been as if God had chosen an unrepentant felon to be the most powerful man in the world.

(Sorry — couldn’t resist rhyming history.)

In order to describe the manifestations of Egyptian feelings about ma’at in the face of such disasters, I started looking for ancient texts about it, thinking there would be poems and prayers I could use. What I found was fascinating. Also strange.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead, which is not actually a single book but rather a huge collection of scrolls that have their antecedents in Egyptian civilization’s infancy, contains a list of “ideals” or denials of bad behavior that every soul must proclaim aloud to each of its 42 judges. The inventory starts out reasonably, with declarations that “I have not committed sin,” “I have not committed robbery with violence,” and “I have not stolen.” It moves on to higher moral standards such as, “I have not uttered lies” (notably missing from the Ten Commandments unless the lie is false testimony about a neighbor — see Deuteronomy 5:20). The Egyptian ideals continue with such saintly and not terribly believable statements like “I have made none to weep” and “I have not been angry,” and then begin to include weirdly specific proclamations such as “I have not worked witchcraft against the king,” “I have not multiplied my words in speaking,” and “I have never stopped the flow of water of a neighbor.”

I really wanted to figure out a way to get that last one into my book. But for fear of multiplying my words in fiction writing, I figured it would be a better move to simply share the list with blog readers.

And before their hearts were weighed in the balance… Speaking of death in ancient Egypt, I needed to find a reliable estimate of a normal lifespan in order to figure out the limits of Egyptian-style slavery. One of the many terrific aspects of having a diverse group of workshoppers while composing a manuscript is that they see things the like-minded might not have remarked on; a Black reader of my first couple of chapters noticed that I hadn’t really gotten into the differences between the “hard labor” described in the Bible (Exodus 1:14) and American chattel slavery, including the possibility that Israelite slaves might have been able to retire. Since I had my twin Israelite protagonists’ grandmother taking care of the house while the adults worked for Pharaoh in various capacities, I had to know how old this character was and how long her “career” might have been.

I found answers in a blog post on the University College of London Museum website. Working backwards, I figured the grandmother could have been 40 after kneading dough in the royal bakery for 17 years starting on her 13th birthday, and then taking over the job of raising her youngest grandchildren so that their mother could go back to work. According to my source, the matriarch would have been quite a bit older than average at that point.

Curious about how this character, who had spent most of her life in Egypt, might relate to the concept of ma’at, I started looking in the Hebrew Bible for references to balance. I was surprised and pleased to find the metaphor of a scale in the Book of Job, considered the earliest book composed in what became the biblical canon and therefore quite possibly known, at least in part, at the time of my story. But Job’s plea that God “weigh me with honest scales, that He may know my integrity” (Job 31:6) is different from the balances of Ma’at. In his final speech, Job details appropriate punishments for infractions of social justice: “If I have raised my hand against the fatherless, knowing I have influence in court, then let my arm fall from the shoulder, let it be broken off at the joint” (Job 31:21–22); “If my land cries out against me and its furrows weep together, if I have devoured its produce without payment or broken the spirit of its tenants, then let briers grow instead of wheat and stinkweed instead of barley” (Job 31: 38–40). There is a kind of “eye for an eye” balance here, but the punishments are in this life, for this moment, and not eternal death.

So the idea that we all have obligations to the rest of the world, and that our fulfillment of those commitments is the truest measure of our souls, has outlasted Pharaoh’s confession of ideals to the gods — despite the fact that the ancient Israelites were Levantine nomads who left almost no archaeological remnants, in contrast with the stupendous architectural achievements of the Egyptians.

Maybe that evens the scales, just a little.