The prosecutors of the old charge of “folklore and mythology” so constantly directed against the faith of those who hold to the credibility of our present Scripture text, found some of their keenest shafts in the Biblical account of the exodus from Egypt. Scrutinizing the record of that notable event under the microscope of prejudice, the critics claimed to have found many outstanding weaknesses in the text. Particularly was this so in that section of the story which dealt with the plagues with which Almighty God smote the land and broke down the resistance of Pharaoh.
There is, therefore, a manifestation of a sardonic humor in the present situation. After denying for generations that these plagues ever occurred, the critics now seek to rob the account of any value by their new technique of acquiescence. The really modern method of discrediting the Scripture is to admit that there is some truth in the record and then subtly twist the meaning of the text out of all harmony with the general plan of revelation. As a noteworthy example of this modern technique of criticism, we submit a leading article which appeared in the London Express of Sunday, September 6, 1936.
Professing to accept the historical record of the ten plagues, the writer of this article then craftily proceeds to offer a peculiarly human and mechanistic theory to account for the disaster. In reading this news item, we are at once struck by the fact that every element of a supernatural nature is deleted from the strange series of events, and the credit for the entire victory of Israel is ascribed to the human genius of the man Moses. This news item appeared in the following form:
THE PLAGUES OF EGYPT
SHOW THAT MOSES ANTICIPATED BY 3,000 YEARS THE GREATEST FEAR OF MODERN SCIENCE
Science has been inquiring into one of the greatest catastrophes that befell a nation—the ten plagues of Egypt.
They have found that modern theories are in accord with the Bible story.
The plagues were brought upon the Egyptians by Moses in the days of Israel’s captivity. Dr. Charles J. Brim, a New York authority on public health, says that Moses must have anticipated by 3,000 years modern science’s greatest fear—the use of disease germs, water pollution and other attacks on sanitation as war weapons—in short, bacteriological warfare.
Moses, states Dr. Brim, in addition to being the founder of the science of hygiene, showed that germ warfare could annihilate man and beast more effectively than arms and man power. With it he bent the mighty Egyptians to his will and thus brought about the Exodus, the release of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery. With it he so undermined their man power and morale that it became impossible for them to face the hardships of war.
The ten plagues, in their order, were:
Changing the water into blood;
The frogs;
The lice;
The flies;
The murrain of cattle;
The boils on the Egyptians;
Hail;
The locusts;
The darkness;
The death of the first-born.
“The first step in this carefully planned attack,” says Dr. Brim in a newly published book, “Medicine in the Bible,” “was the pollution of Egypt’s water supply.”
This had two results: First, it attacked the god of Egypt—the Nile; secondly, it sapped the very fountain of the country.
Egyptian legend said that the Nile sprang from the blood of the god Osiris. Hence, “the waters of the Nile were turned into blood.”
Egypt depended on the Nile for its drinking water, on its yearly inundations for the irrigation of the fields.
A polluted Nile was a smashing blow at the water supply and at the crops and cattle. Nobody could wash or drink.
The fish—one of the staple foods—died. Frogs were forced to leave their natural haunts in the river banks and invaded the streets, fields and houses in their millions.
Swarms of frogs, with no water or food, died and rotted over the countryside. Cartloads were burned, but not before the germs of pollution had time to multiply.
The air became filled with the disease germs bred in this ideal forcing-ground. People and animals became infected.
Flies descended in swarms greater than people had ever seen, bringing more germs with them. Cattle died in their thousands.
Dust, in a naturally dusty country, became infected, spreading more disease and death. Nature took a turn. A terrific hailstorm shrieked over Egypt. The few crops that were left standing were flattened and destroyed. Animals were killed by the force of the hailstones. Next came the locusts, dropping in their millions on the fields, eating everything the hail had left.
When they passed, a dust storm, caused probably by the hot, electrical wind known as the hamsin, blew up and darkened the sky for days on end, as sandstorms still do in that part of the world. The tenth and last plague, the death of the first-born, was a natural consequence of all that had happened since the day the water became polluted.
The Bible does not say explicitly that only the first-born died in this plague.
What it does say is:
And it came to pass that at midnight the Lord smote all the first-born in the land of Egypt, from the first-born of Pharaoh that sat on his throne to the first-born of the captive that was in the dungeon.
The epidemic killed many others, but in the death of the first-born lay the greatest calamity, for the first-born son was chief in every Egyptian household.
Dr. Brim does not explain how the first plague was brought about, but if Moses did pollute the Nile it must have been done when the water was low.
It is certain that Moses was a medical genius, as his laws of health prove, and knew the certain effects of water pollution.
Neither does the doctor explain how Moses foresaw the hail, but it is possible he could judge atmospheric conditions with precision.—V. B.
It is perhaps an inaccuracy to talk about “modern” attempts to thwart and deny the Word of God! There is nothing modern about this entire propaganda, popular as it may be in our own day. The error is ancient, as is the attitude of mind that would set aside the element of the supernatural in Holy Writ, and oppose the time-honored revelation of God’s will by the modern self-satisfaction with human learning. Indeed, this common and basic sin of our generation is so far from being modern, that the very first recorded case of denial of God’s Word comes from the Garden of Eden, man’s first and original home.
Even before sin had reared its ugly head, to shatter the sweet communion and spoil the fair harmony that was the basis of man’s fellowship with his Creator, this error appeared. It was Satan who, encroaching upon the beauty of Eden’s fair content, first said, “Hath God said?” The denial of the truth of God’s spoken word originated with the enemy of man: and it would behoove us all to remember that any man who has questioned His written word from that hour to this, is also an enemy, and an emissary of the original foe of mankind! Do we owe Satan so great a debt of gratitude for the deep and dark pit of woe into which he has lured our race, that we must lend slavish attention to the same old error when he sponsors it today?
For this “modern” attempt to discredit the Scripture is but a recrudescence of his ancient and simple strategy for the hurt of mankind. Well does he know that if he can but shake the faith of our generation in the integrity of the Bible, faith in God must soon be lost as well. Once more pedantic scoffers, professors of this and of that, arise solemnly to refute the truth of the only “map” that can ever guide men back to the Paradise we lost when the first man rejected God’s revelation.
It is interesting to see that this old error is in no new guise, in the article referred to above. This is nothing new, it is just an original approach to the same old mess of Satanic whispering. Indeed, Paul warned us of the possibility of this very article and method in II Timothy 3:8, when he said:
Now as Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses, so do these also resist the truth: men of corrupt minds, reprobate concerning the faith.
He introduces the very age of Egyptian history, and the events connected with the Exodus in speaking thus of the false teachers of the apostate days that should precede the time of our Lord’s return. And lo! the event transpires in this year of grace, as the press of the twentieth century casts doubt upon the Ten Plagues in this subtle manner.
It is subtle. Also dishonest to the nth degree. Professing to accept the historicity of the events, the article then proceeds to demolish the credibility of the record, by ascribing all the plagues to natural forces, directed by the genius of a human being, namely, Moses. God is ruled out, the supernatural denied, and common sense prostituted to infidelity in a manner that the shallowest thinker could not countenance. For a man of medicine, or a scholar in any realm of science, to foster such a contemptible evasion of plain fact, passes understanding.
A few years ago it was customary for criticism to deny that these plagues ever happened. Classifying them among the reputed folklore of the Hebrews, and relegating them to the realm of the purely mythological, the critic calmly and boldly denied that they ever occurred at all. But these past years of research and study have so established the historicity of the record, that this procedure is no longer possible; so the new attack is made, on the basis of naturalism.
It is plainly stated that Moses himself brought about these plagues upon the Egyptians, and that he did so by the use of his own superior knowledge. In a word, he was a bacteriologist, three and a half thousand years before Pasteur! That in itself is a greater miracle than the plagues could ever have been! No microscope, no instruments of research, yet he not only anticipated the discoveries of Lister and Pasteur, but he also applied germ warfare to the redemption of Israel, and “bent the Egyptians to his will.”
More marvelous than all this, he did it by simply polluting the Nile River, the source of the life of Egypt. This of course was a simple task! The Nile is a mighty river. If we follow its course just from the First Cataract at Assuan to the mouth, it is over five hundred miles as the river twists and bends round and about.
Now all Moses had to do was to impregnate those five hundred miles of winding river with some deadly form of disease germs, that would affect the Egyptians but not the Israelites! Any nice germ would do! Of course, he had also to keep those five hundred miles of flowing stream polluted, in spite of the rushing current that swept fresh water down day by day! Let us not forget, that he did all this while Pharaoh was looking on: and that for seven days the condition continued, then to end as suddenly as it had begun. We should like to know something of his technique!
Then, after the river had cleared its waters, Moses boldly announced that the Lord would overrun the land with frogs! This was done, not as a result of a polluted river, but rather after the river was clear. Pollution with disease germs might have driven the frogs out of the river: but how did Moses get them to go back, as Pharaoh entreated him to do?
Most conveniently, the author of the above cited article does not mention how the lice were spread over the land by Moses! Did he personally catch them and spread them all around, or had he been breeding and storing them for years in advance? The flies may have increased in the rotting piles of frogs, but what kept this pest of flies out of the small section of Egypt called the Land of Goshen, where the children of Israel were? Given the conditions that caused the flies to breed, why did they refrain from the particular portion of the land where Moses and his people were camping?
So also for the murrain on the cattle, and the boils on the Egyptians. None of Israel were affected by these disasters. Did Moses have some kind of salve or prophylactic serum that he used, he being the great medical genius that this article makes him to be? Even that will not account for the fact that when the hail came, it, also, avoided the camp of Moses and his three and a half million compatriots!
But even a great medical genius and an accomplished meteorologist could not have foreseen the coming of the locusts that darkened the sky and the land as well. Nor could this great medical genius, even had he also been an able entomologist, have seen to it that the locusts ate only Egyptian vegetation, as Goshen greenery would have been just as acceptable to hungry locusts! And who ever saw any other kind?
Passing over the supernatural darkness with the simple observation that it was not an ordinary phenomenon such as a sandstorm (which left the houses of the Israelites unaffected), we will hasten to the conclusion of the matter, the death of the first-born. The article we are quoting makes a terribly strained attempt to prove that others died as well as the first-born, but the text of the Scripture does not so state or imply. Indeed, the text very clearly sets forth the fact that it was only the first-born who died. They died dramatically; all at the same hour.
At midnight, simultaneously, death smote a certain restricted class.
The prince in the palace, and the felon in the dungeon; the cattle as well.
But the first-born of Israel did not die!
They were all under the blood!
Quaint epidemic, was it not? It came as a result of disease germs in the river Nile, it killed all its victims out of just one class, the first-born, and it passed over any home that had lamb’s blood on the door posts!
Is it necessary for a man to believe such arrant nonsense, and accept such utterances of folly before he can qualify as an educated man, or a scientist?
Most fortunately, it is not!
To show the truth of this matter, we can indeed study these ten plagues in the light of modern science. Not by the flickering rays of the lamp of human speculation can understanding be achieved. Only in the full illumination of the sunshine of historical fact can the truth be discerned. So, we will turn to the great and truly modern science of archeology to study the Ten Plagues of Egypt, and see what the truth of the matter really is.
In the first place, thanks to the vast amount of research in the archeology of Egypt, we now know that these ten plagues were a contest between the Lord God of the Israelites, and the pantheon of Egypt.
The genesis of the contest is given in Exodus 3:18. Here Moses is instructed by God to ask Pharaoh for a three-day furlough for the entire company of the Twelve Tribes, that they might go three days’ journey into the wilderness, and sacrifice to Jehovah. This initial request was to be the first step in a campaign that would result in the redemption of Israel from their long bondage, and the apparently reasonable request was made with the certainty that it would be refused. Indeed, the request was such that Pharaoh could not grant it!
As we shall later see, the Egyptians were the most polytheistic nation that ever lived. In their pantheon of deities there were more than twenty-two hundred gods and goddesses, and each of them had a particular theophany. That is to say, these gods and goddesses had certain animals that were sacred to them, and in which animal form the particular god or goddess occasionally manifested a personal presence. So very often the deities of Egypt are depicted in stone and painting as having a human body, but an animal head. Thus Thoth might be seen with the head of an ibis, while Hathor sometimes has a human head, but more often she is portrayed with the head of a cow.
So there was no animal that the Hebrews could sacrifice to their God, Jehovah, that would not be sacred to some Egyptian deity. This sacrifice would constitute blasphemy in the eyes of the Egyptian masters, and trouble would eventuate immediately! Indeed, when Pharaoh, worn out by the troubles brought upon him by the plagues, suggested to Moses that the people sacrifice to Jehovah without going to the wilderness, Moses simply replied in the language that is recorded in Exodus 8:26:
“What shall we sacrifice, that will not be an abomination in the eyes of the Egyptians? Will they not stone the people if they sacrifice in the land?”
The justice of the reply was so self-apparent that the ruler did not press his suggestion, as the text shows. Thus God forced the issue and provoked the conflict that not only freed His people from slavery and eventually established them in the land that He had promised them through Abraham, but also showed His supremacy over the gods of Egypt. Even more than that, in the resultant series of events, the Lord God brought such glory to His own Name, and showed such omnipotence that the world has never forgotten this drama, even to our own day and time. Witness the very article that is the subject of this present comment!
The clear statement of God’s attitude toward the conflict is seen in Exodus 4:23, 24. The figure of speech used there is a divine choice, therefore we use it just as God Himself expressed His own mind to Moses. The “first-born” was the chief object of interest in every Egyptian household, for two reasons. The law of primogeniture ruled in that day and land, even as it does in England and other countries today. Also, the first-born of every species, animal or human, was dedicated to the gods, and was a sacred object, in a very strong sense of that word. So later, we hear the law of Israel as set forth by God, that the first-born of man or beast in the land is to be sacred to Jehovah: not to the gods of Egypt.
Now then, as Moses was sent to Pharaoh, to carry the demands of God for the release of the people, he was instructed to tell the ruler that Israel was, in God’s sight, as prized and beloved a group as the “first-born” was in an Egyptian household. In a figure of speech that Egypt as a whole could most clearly grasp, God said: “Israel is My son, My first-born: And I have said unto thee, Let my son go that he may serve me; and thou hast refused to let him go; behold, I will slay thy son, thy first-born.”
With this introduction, we can see clearly the genesis of the conflict. It is most clearly stated in Exodus 5:1-3. When Moses said to Pharaoh, “Thus saith Jehovah, the God of Israel, Let my people go, that they may hold a feast unto Me in the wilderness:” the ruler of the land said, in just so many words, “Who is Jehovah? I never heard of him!” Not only did the mighty king reject the word and the commands of God, but he also denied Him in no uncertain terms. This upstart Jehovah, who was He to give orders to Pharaoh the mighty? He was the god of an humbled and captive people, therefore the king reasoned that his own gods must be far mightier! So the proud and haughty monarch said, “I’ll stick by the gods of Egypt; I know not this Jehovah, and I will not obey His words.”
Moses left with the clearly expressed warning that the king might not then know Jehovah, but that he was certainly destined to find out about Him! The call to arms, the challenge to combat, and the prophecy of God’s victory are all expressed in the single verse in Exodus the seventh chapter, where God tells Moses that “the Egyptians shall know that I am Jehovah, when I stretch out my hand upon Egypt....” This, then, was the primary reason for the ten plagues. God would teach the Egyptians a lesson through judgments that the land would never forget! When he finished with them, none were ever again able to say, “And who is this Jehovah? The gods of Egypt are stronger.”
Thus we see that the contest was primarily between the monotheism of Israel and polytheism of Egypt. We would emphasize the fact that the Egyptians were perhaps the most polytheistic race the world has so far known. It is impossible to say just how many deities existed to the Egyptian mind, but “their name was legion”! Two hundred separate deities are named in the Pyramid Text, and four hundred and eighty more are named in the Theban Recension of the Book of the Dead. Altogether, archeologists have recovered the names of over two thousand two hundred different gods and goddesses that were worshipped by the Egyptians! Is it any wonder that Jehovah must start His laws to His people with the commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me!”?
A word about these objects of Egyptian worship will be necessary to clear up the necessary later references to the practices and the beliefs of the Egyptians. While these ancient folks never had the idea of an immanent, pervasive God, in the monotheistic sense, they still had a dim conception of a super-god principle, behind and over the various individual gods and goddesses. There was first of all the grouping of gods into triads, which was a widely accepted custom. Since each triad consisted of a god, a wife, and a son, this grouping is less a degeneration of the principle of the Trinity than might seem to be suggested at first thought. Rather, it was a glorification of the family principle.
Thus we see that at Thebes, the principal triad of deities consists of Amon-Ra, the king of all the gods, Mut, his Wife, and Khons, their son.
Ba-neb-Ded, with his wife Het-mehit, and their son Harpakhrad (whom the Greeks later called Harpokrates) constituted the triad at Mendes. In like manner, the Memphis triad was composed of Ptah, Sekhmet, and Imhotep. Sometimes the greater gods were grouped into a company of nine, called the Ennead. There was also the grouping of the major deities into the “Three Companies,” being the gods of the heaven, the earth, and the Other or Under World.
All the gods had human bodies, but some of them had animal heads. Sometimes a god who customarily had a human head would appear wearing the animal head of his theophany, as in the case of Hathor, cited above. Thus when Hathor appears with a cow’s head upon a human body, she appears with the solar disk between her horns; and when she appears with the human head, she wears as a headdress the bonnet of the goddess Mut, the wife of Amon-Ra, the horns of the cow, the solar disk which shows her relationship to Horus, and the feather of the goddess Maat.
We have previously asserted that each plague was a direct blow at one of these celestial beings, and it might be profitable to demonstrate this fact with a few concrete illustrations.
The First Plague was a direct and definite blow at a numerous company of these objects of worship. In the first place, the River Nile was itself an object of worship. It was reputed to flow from the celestial stream called Nu, and was heavenly in its origin. It brought life to the entire land of Egypt, and was worshipped with appropriate and very exact ritual. There were hymns to the Nile, prayers and offerings to and for the Nile, and the river possessed in itself a very real personality. The River is pictured in the form of a man wearing a cluster of water plants upon his head, and the idea of fertility is conveyed by giving him the heavy pendant breasts of a nursing mother! In the British Museum may be seen a remarkable papyrus, containing the Hymn to the Nile. To show the reverence felt for the power of the great River, we quote just a sentence or two from this Hymn:
... Thou art the Lord of the poor and needy. If thou wert overthrown in the heavens, the gods would fall upon their faces, and men would perish....
This deified river, then, the source of life and blessing in Egypt, was smitten by God, and its waters turned to blood. Frantically the Egyptians sought to dig shallow wells by the banks of the stream, as their water supply failed them for the first time in the memory of man! Truly, Jehovah was greater than the Nile! And not only greater than the River itself, there was more than this involved. There were many issues involved, and many deities suffered “loss of face” that day!
There was the mighty Osiris, who was himself the cause and source of the resurrection and of everlasting life. Greatest of all the gods of the underworld, he has an important part in the text of the Book of the Dead. The Nile was supposed to be his bloodstream! When God smote the Nile, he laid the mighty Osiris low in the dust! With him fell Hapi—who was the Nile-god, and also Satet, the wife of Khnemu, the goddess of the annual inundation. Her divine sister, Anqet, bit the dust that day, as she was the personification of the Nile waters, which turned into an offense and a stench when Moses stretched out his staff. Time will not permit the presentation of the characters of Isis-Sothis, Isis-Hathor, Ament, Menat, Renpit and at least two score more, all of whom met defeat in the First Plague. None of them could sustain their prestige and power in the face of the action of Jehovah, and He emerged victorious in the first trial of strength.
The Second Plague was likewise a contest between the Lord of the heavens and the earth, and certain specific ideas of the Egyptian system of worship. The plague of frogs that covered the land, making life a burden to the people, was a blow struck at Heqt, the wife of the great Khnum, whose theophany was a frog. Indeed, she was called the “frog-goddess,” and this lowly creature was sacred to her. The frog was the symbol of the resurrection, and the emblem of fertility. It was reverenced by the people, and to have one around the dwelling place was a sign of good fortune and was supposed to ensure a fertile year for farm and family alike.
They got enough of this quaint object of reverence when God flooded their land with myriads of the beastly things! They were in the bread-trough, and got tangled up in the dough, thus adding a rather quaint flavor to the bread! The bread could not be baked, however, as the baking ovens crawled with frogs, and the fires could not be lighted. They hopped all over the master of the house, and when he sought his bed in disgust they were there before him.
Like a blanket of filth the slimy, wet monstrosities covered the land, until men sickened at the continued squashing crunch of the ghastly pavement they were forced to walk upon. If a man’s feet slipped on the greasy mass of their crushed bodies, he fell into an indescribably offensive mass of putrid uncleanness, and when he sought water to cleanse himself, the water was so solid with frogs, he got no cleansing there. In sheer desperation the mighty king was forced to beg, “Call off your frogs, and I will let the people go!” Read Exodus 8:1-15.
And with that cry, the prestige of Heqt and Khnum was gone forever, drowned out in the tidal wave of disgust that rolled up in protest at too much of her theophany!
It is a bit difficult to imagine that generation of Egyptians ever worshipping the Frog again.
Plagues Three and Four are a bit more difficult to deal with at the present writing, because of the personal ignorance of the writer. By that he means to say that more light is required here as he does not know definitely the exact god that was meant to suffer in the estimation of the people, with the plague of lice. There can be no question, however, that the people themselves were hard hit, as any veteran of the A. E. F. will be only too glad to testify! This unclean parasite must have been a source of misery that was well-nigh insuperable, when it became as numerous as the very dust of the ground! It must have made the Egyptians somewhat envious to see the Israelites basking in peace and bodily comfort, while they, the lords of the land, itched and scratched and suffered the misery of this vicious pest! How much better to trust the God Jehovah who demonstrated His ability to keep His followers free from even such a plague as this.
As for the flies, there is this suggestion, at least: one of them was sacred to the name of Uatchit. What variety of fly is intended in the text we cannot definitely say, as there are numerous species of flies. But the ichneumon fly is a symbol of this god, and their figures in tiny statues and on papyri are well known to the modern archeologist. They are a brilliant and beautiful insect, somewhat prized by the entomologists of our day as specimens, but they can be a pest when they come in too numerous companies!
Some years ago we were encamped in Mexico, with a company who were digging for archeological treasure. The site was pleasant, the camp was near a clear, meandering stream, and the shade trees were enjoyable. There was just “one fly in the ointment” and that fly was the ichneumon. Every time food was placed upon the camp table, this gorgeous insect responded with enthusiasm and delight. They came in regiments and companies, bringing all their relatives and friends with them! So we could say from experience, that anyone who had to fight with a swarm of ichneumon flies for his own share of the lunch, would soon come to revile the god to whom this symbol was sacred! Not only Jehovah, but any god would seem preferable to Uatchit after an invasion of his particular pets. Or should we turn this last word around and make it pest, instead?
When we come to the Fifth Plague, we are again on solid and assured territory. Once more firm archeological ground supports the theme of this chapter. When God smote the cattle of Egypt, He dealt most definitely and drastically with Egyptian polytheism. There were many of the supreme objects of Egyptian worship that met their Waterloo in the murrain on the cattle.
Chief of these is the mighty and venerated
