Story

The Ten Plagues

c. 1300 BCE

Biblical Narrative

When Moses came back to Pharaoh and asked him to let the people go, Pharaoh said, Who is the Lord that I should obey his voice? I know not the Lord, neither will I let Israel go. So began the struggle that the book of Exodus presents as a duel of gods. Each plague would strike at one of Egypt's deities and one of Egypt's economic pillars: the Nile, the cattle, the sun, the firstborn. Each would harden Pharaoh's heart further. Each would make Israel's deliverance more inevitable.

First the Nile turned to blood, and the fish died, and the river stank, and Egypt could not drink. Then frogs swarmed up out of the river into the houses and the kneading-troughs. Then lice from the dust. Then swarms of flies, but only in the houses of Egypt — the land of Goshen, where Israel dwelt, was untouched. Then a disease that killed the cattle of Egypt while sparing the cattle of Israel. Then boils that even Pharaoh's magicians could not stand against. Then thunder and hail with fire, in a land where it scarcely rained. Then locusts that ate what the hail had spared. Then darkness over Egypt for three days, while in the dwellings of Israel there was light.

Pharaoh's heart was hardened — first by his own decision, then increasingly, the text says, by the Lord himself. The Pharaoh of Exodus is a study in the psychology of refusal: each plague brings him to the brink of release, and each respite hardens him again. By the ninth plague he is bargaining; by the tenth he has run out of bargains.

The tenth plague is the hinge. At midnight the destroyer would pass through the land of Egypt, and every firstborn — from Pharaoh on his throne to the maidservant behind her mill — would die. But every Israelite house with a lintel marked in lamb's blood would be passed over. Israel kept the first Passover that night with their loins girded and their staves in their hands; at midnight the cry went up in Egypt that there was not a house in which there was not one dead; and Pharaoh rose in the night and called Moses and said, Rise up, get you forth from among my people.

And it came to pass at midnight, that the LORD smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt... And there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead.Exodus 12:29-30

Archaeology · History · Genetics

Naturalistic interpretations of the plagues run back to Greenberg, Hort, and earlier nineteenth-century Egyptologists. Greta Hort's two-part article 'The Plagues of Egypt' in Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (1957-58) proposed a unified ecological cascade: a heavy late-summer Nile flood carrying suspended red flagellate algae (Pfiesteria-class) gives the river its 'blood' colour and its anoxic kill of fish; the dying fish drive frogs onto land; the frogs, dying en masse, leave a niche for biting insects; the insects spread cattle-borne diseases; the disrupted ecology produces eventually a hailstorm and a locust plague carried by the prevailing winds from Ethiopia; the locust dust and a Khamsin sandstorm produce the days of darkness.

The Hort cascade is elegant but speculative. It cannot account for the tenth plague at all and has been criticized for over-fitting Egyptian ecology to a literary sequence. Still, certain parallels are striking: the Ipuwer Papyrus (Leiden 344, conventionally dated to the late Middle Kingdom or Second Intermediate Period) describes Egypt in a language remarkably similar to Exodus 7-12: 'the river is blood', 'plague is throughout the land', 'gold and lapis are hung about the necks of slaves while noblewomen go in rags'. Whether Ipuwer is a description of conditions during the Hyksos collapse, of the First Intermediate Period chaos, or a literary trope of social inversion is debated.

Volcanological hypotheses have linked the plagues to the eruption of Thera (Santorini) c. 1620 BCE, which produced a global ash cloud, possible reddening of waters by iron-rich ash deposition, and atmospheric phenomena including dust-veil darkness. The chronology is awkward: Thera is too early for any conventional Exodus-date, though some Egyptologists (Bietak among them) have argued for a redated Thera in the late 16th century BCE that would bring it closer.

From an Egyptological standpoint, the most striking thing about the plague-narrative is what it does not contain: no Egyptian source from any period mentions the catastrophic loss of every firstborn or the destruction of Pharaoh's army at the Sea of Reeds. Egyptian royal inscriptions are systematically silent about defeats — Ramesses II celebrated Kadesh as a victory despite fighting it to a draw — so this silence is not decisive. But it does mean that the plagues, like the Exodus itself, are an event that exists fully only within the textual tradition that records them.

The Plagues of Egypt make sense as theology and as literature; their plausibility as history is a separate question, and the silence of Egyptian sources will probably never be filled.James K. Hoffmeier, Israel in Egypt (1996)