This aspect of Exodus has a natural explanation, but the story also seems deliberately constructed.
For the past three months I’ve been summarizing select articles from the Biblical Archaeology Review (not so much a scholarly publication as a popularized publication for biblical scholars) by respected authorities in their fields like archaeologists whose finds are in the British Museum and Egyptologists from Brown University. They all conclude that the stories around the Exodus are interpretations of events that actually took place — not the exact events as described in the Hebrew Bible, but based in reality nonetheless.
These articles, and others like them, were a major impetus for me to write a novel from the point of view of nonbiblical characters about what it might have been like to experience the Ten Plagues, the Red Sea Crossing, and the Giving of the Law at Sinai, without sacrificing an iota of modern scientific skepticism. I’ve based my plot entirely on plausibly naturalistic explanations for these phenomena, as well as scholarly explorations about what the belief systems of Semitic tribes living in Egypt might have looked like. (Spoiler alert: They weren’t monotheistic.)
In this last installment of my series, Semitic language specialist Ziony Zevit looks at the Ten Plagues through three lenses: naturalistic, literary and culturally contextual. Because his piece is from 1990, some of the ideas about why the Nile was described as turning to blood are a little behind the times: Zevit talks about red clay sweeping down from the Ethiopian highlands into the Egyptian delta, whereas a 21st century theory posits a red algal bloom stemming from a temperature anomaly in the southern Mediterranean.
But no matter what its origin, such a dramatic event would have led logically to the next several plagues, as frogs hopped out of the river seeking to escape, soon dying and failing to eat the pests that multiplied as they feasted on the amphibians’ carcasses. These flying and creeping insects could carry diseases infecting humans and livestock alike, leading to boils on the people and a deadly epidemic among the cattle and horses. The heat dome would also bring massive hailstorms as well as a potential explosion in the locust population. This describes a total of of eight out of ten plagues, more or less in sequence.
Although this science-based explanation for the plagues is quite tenable, Zevit cites an interesting text that points to the Nile’s bloody metamorphosis as possibly originating in an Egyptian myth. One comment dating from around 2050 BCE claims that “the River [Nile] is blood. If one drinks of it, one rejects (it) as human and thirsts for water.” Zevit says that this was written during a “chaotic period” in Egypt’s history, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t have been inspired by an earlier algal bloom. That’s the path I took as a novelist: I had my protagonists’ grandmother remember seeing something similar to the scarlet Nile, if on a smaller scale, when she was a girl.
Zevit also quotes an Egyptian text mentioning darkness covering the sun’s disc: “It will not shine (so that) people may see … No one knows when midday falls, for his shadow cannot be distinguished.” Darkness, the ninth plague, is one of two that are not explicable by way of climatology. My novel takes care of that one by assuming that the hygiene-sensitive Egyptians would kindle huge funeral pyres of dead, diseased livestock, and an unfortunate prevailing wind could have blown the smoke into their homes while those of the Israelites remained relatively clear.
But it is the ghastly final plague, the Death of the Firstborn, that has the most eerily familiar echoes in Egyptian religious literature. Zevit cites two of what he says are “a few” magical texts printed inside coffins: “It is the king who will be judged with Him-whose-name-is-hidden on that day of slaying the first born,” and “I am he who will be judged with Him-whose-name-is-hidden on that night of slaying the first born.”
There is no evidence that Semitic slaves or day workers would have been familiar enough with the multifariousness of Egyptian deity worship that they would incorporate an obviously secretive tenet of it into their own very public holy writ. But Zevit believes that the plagues narrative may have been built to match up each catastrophe at the hands of Israel’s god with a failure of one of Egypt’s. He discusses a pattern, noticed by rabbis as early as the 12th century: If you divide the plagues into three groups of three, the first two plagues come after threats by Moses and then the third one just hits the Egyptians without warning; in the second group the same thing happens, with the next two plagues occurring with a warning and the sixth without; and then the next two plagues are forewarned and the ninth – as well as the unimaginable tenth – strike the final blows without a word beforehand. Zevit writes, “These patterns indicate that the plague narrative is a conscientiously articulated and tightly wrought composition.”
And yet, there are two factors that Zevit argues are conclusive for a “historical kernel . . . underl[ying] the Egyptian plague traditions preserved in the Bible.” One is the fact that there are “calamitous events that do not derive from experiences in the Land of Israel; this establishes . . . that the tradition has roots in an ecological system unknown to the Israelites living in their own land.” The other is that “an Egyptian milieu not only provides a basis for explaining the plagues in terms of natural phenomena, it also allows us plausibly to link at least some of the sequences of plagues.”
So the Ten Plagues story is “a conscientiously articulated and tightly wrought composition” that still contains “a historical kernel,” according to Zevit. In other words, it is literary nonfiction that shares a genre with such modern works as Elie Wiesel’s Night, James McBride’s The Color of Water, or Patti Smith’s Just Kids — with the exception that is was probably written by many different people and cobbled together into a moderately coherent form many decades or centuries after the events it describes.
This is surely not a modern conception of literature. But it may have been one that was built to last for all time.
