(Image from JewishSoftware. Look at the lower left panel.
Note how the Egyptians are speaking with an Italian accent!)
The Bible contains some true statements and many false ones. It is worthwhile to try to determine which parts of the book are actually true.
Last year, I reviewed a documentary on the National Geographic Channel called Exodus Revealed (Read part 1 and part 2). That documentary had some interesting speculations on what might have really happened. Just recently, they ran another documentary. This one is called Curses of Ancient Egypt: The Ten Plagues. Let’s look at this recent documentary and compare it to the earlier one. Unlike the earlier documentary, this recent one focussed solely on the ten plagues.
First, they introduce us to Professor Ken Kitchen of Liverpool University. The narrator tells us:
He believes that a combination of scientific and archaeological evidence proves that the plagues actually took place. He can even date them to the reign of Ramses II, which started less than 50 years after the death of Tutankhamen.
…
The Bible says that the Pharaoh forced the Israelites to build a city called Ramses, with bricks of mud and straw. But no evidence had been found that such a rich and extensive city ever really existed, until now.
Next, they introduce us to Dr. Edgar Push, an archaeologist who is excavating a huge mud-brick city that he and Kitchen believe is the city of Ramses. They say it is equal in size to ancient Rome or Babylon.
This is news to me. If it turns out to be true, it raises the question of which, if any, of the other claims of Exodus are also true.
The Ten Plagues
Now let’s look at their claims for how the ten plagues actually occurred.
1. River Turned to Blood. Kitchen quotes scholar Greta Hort, who proposed a high flood as the cause of the red river. Extra-heavy rains in Ethiopia would wash a lot of the red soil into the river, coloring the water.
That explains the color, but what about the dead fish? They trot out Professor Hugh Pennington, bacteriologist at Aberdeen University. The narrator says:
[Pennington] believes that a massive algal bloom could cause the dead fish and stinking water described in the Bible.
2. Frogs. Professor Tony Brown of Exeter University says that the conditions after the flood were ideal for frog breeding. Pennington says the mature frogs then leave the river, because it is inhospitable.
3. Lice. Kitchen says that “lice” is a mistranslation by early scholars who didn’t know much about Nile insects. He suggests that it could have been mosquitoes or some other water-breeding insects that spread disease.
4. Flies. Pennington says that when conditions are right, the flies can breed prolifically.
5. Death of Livestock. Pennington suggests anthrax, which would have flourished in the wet ground after the flood.
6. Boils. Pennington says the flies transferred the anthrax from the cattle to the humans.
7. Hail. Kitchen says they just had bad luck and got a nasty hailstorm.
8. Locusts. Supposedly the heavy rainfall that caused the flood would have created ideal conditions for a swarm of locusts.
9. Darkness. Brown suggests that the darkness was a sandstorm.
10. Death of the First Born. None of these scholars had an explanation for this. There is no Egyptian record of this plague.
They also show us yet another expert, Dr. Aidan Dodson, Egyptologist at Bristol University. Dodson says that Egyptians didn’t record the plagues in their records, because they didn’t like to record negative events. They wanted to leave a positive view of Egypt for posterity. The Egyptians also believed that what is depicted on tomb walls is magically replayed in the next world.
Kitchen agrees. He says that a pharaoh would never depict a defeat on temple walls, so this explains why the plagues are not mentioned.
Plausible, Plausible…
Those are the explanations put forth in this documentary. They all seem quite plausible, but plausibility and reality are two separate things. None of these explanations requires the actions of a magical skydaddy, so I don’t have any problems with accepting them as reasonable hypotheses.
Allegedly, all of these plagues were foretold as a warning, which the Pharaoh ignored. That part I’m sure was written after the fact. If Egyptian society had just been rocked by a series of ten disasters, they certainly would be looking for a magical explanation. That’s just human nature (sadly).
Comparison
Now let’s compare these explanations with those put forth in the earlier documentary, Exodus Revealed.
1. River Turned to Blood. The two documentaries disagree. This documentary, Curses, suggests silt for the color plus an algal bloom for the fish kill. Revealed suggests a microorganism called Physteria for both color and fish kill.
2. Frogs. Population boom is caused by ideal breeding conditions (Curses) or because there are no fish to eat them (Revealed).
3. Lice. Mosquitoes (Curses) vs. biting midges (Revealed).
4. Flies. Both documentaries more or less agree that conditions were ideal for a population explosion.
5. Death of Livestock. Anthrax (Curses) or diseases transmitted by the biting midge (Revealed).
6. Boils. Both documentaries agree on bacteria. (Curses) specifically names anthrax, while (Revealed) is a bit more vague.
7–9 Hail, Locusts, and Darkness. Both documentaries agree here.
10. Death of the First Born. Here’s where it gets interesting. (Curses) throws up its hands and admits defeat. (Revealed) proposes a couple of possibilities. (1) The Jews cleaned out their grain stores annually, thus minimizing the rats and fleas. This reduced how many of their own people died relative to the Egyptians; or (2) Nasty molds coupled with the Egyptian practice of giving the first born extra food during a famine.
Conclusion
Obviously, these two documentaries disagree a lot on possible explanations for the ten plagues. But what they agree on is that normal, natural phenomena can explain all of these events. This lends credence to this part of the Bible being a reflection of actual events, while at the same time dismantling any need for supernatural explanations.
