Ancient Records and the Exodus Plagues

Home > Magazines > BAR > November/December 1987

Twentieth-century Americans find it difficult to comprehend the notion of plagues. Plagues border on the realm of the unreal; they are the stuff of tall tales, myths and legends. But in the Biblical world, plagues were very real, even ever-present. The plagues of pestilence that were visited on Pharaoh and the Egyptians before he agreed to let the Israelites go reflected an immediacy to the Biblical writer and his initial audience. We, living in the 20th century, must make an affirmative effort to recover this immediacy if we are to enter the Biblical world. Archaeologically recovered texts help […]

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Footnotes

Peter C. Craigie, “The Tablets from Ugarit and Their Importance for Biblical Study,” BAR 09:05).

The Hebrew cognate would be yad elim.

Endnotes

Adolf Erman, The Ancient Egyptians. A Sourcebook of Their Writings, transl. Aylward M. Blackman (New York: Torchbooks/Harper & Row, 1966), pp. 92–108.

Samuel A. B. Mercer, The Tell el-Amarna Tablets (EA), 2 vols. (Toronto: Macmillan, 1939), Text No. 11, line 14.

Mercer, EA, Text No. 35, line 37.

For this text, see Cyrus H. Gordon, Ugaritic Textbook (Rome, Italy: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1965), Text No. 54, lines 11–12.

Mercer, EA, Text No. 49.

Mercer, EA, Text No. 49, lines 22–26.

See Elmar Edel, Agyptische Arete und agyptische Medizin am hethitischen Konigshof (Opladen, West Germany: Rheinisch-Westflische Akademie der Wissenschafter, 1976), p. 89.

Homer, The Odyssey 4:222–232.

Edith K. Ritter, “Magical-Expert (+ASIPU), and Physician (+ASU): Notes on Two Complementary Professions in Babylonian Medicine,” Studies in Honor of Benno Landsberger. Assyriological Studies 16 (Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 229–321.

10.

Georges Dassin, Archives Royales de Mari, vol. 10 (Paris, 1967), No. 129.

11.

The Code of Hammurabi, case law #266.

12.

The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, (Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press), vol. L, p. 200, s.v. liptu A2.