Jots & Tittles

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The Plague’s the Thing

(Wherein We’ll Catch the Conscience of the Pharaoh)

Is there a natural explanation for the Ten Plagues? Dr. John Marr, former chief epidemiologist for New York City, and Curtis Malloy, a medical researcher, think there is. Their theory was recently the focus of the British television program Equinox.

The Book of Exodus (chapters 7–12) describes in vivid detail the series of disasters visited by God upon the Egyptians for Pharaoh’s continued refusal to “let my people go.” The plagues began with the Nile turning to blood and culminated in the death of the firstborn.

Marr and Malloy offer what may be the most sophisticated version yet of the “naturalistic interpretation” of the plagues. Bible scholar Ziony Zevit (“Three Ways to Look at the Ten Plagues,” BR 06:03) writes that such interpretations attempt to explain the plagues in terms of natural phenomena—diseases and natural catastrophes that combined to devastate the Egyptians.

According to Marr and Malloy, the first of the plagues can be traced to a family of single-cell organisms called dinoflagellates. These microscopic creatures release toxins that make fish bleed to death—the underlying cause of the “red tides” that have turned rivers in America and Japan red and undrinkable. This first plague, in turn, explains the second and fourth plagues, frogs and flies. “The fish were dying from a toxic environment,” Marr said on the program, “and toads were escaping from the water, but all died.” The many dead frogs would have attracted a huge number of flies.

The two researchers see a link between the third and fifth plagues, lice and cattle disease. They suggest both were caused by culicoides, which, like lice, cause irritation but also carry a virus that is deadly to livestock. They pin the sixth plague—boils—on the stable fly, which carries the bacteria that cause boils on both humans and animals.

Hail and locusts—the seventh and eighth plagues—were a relative snap for the two medical sleuths, since they both occur occasionally even today. They attribute the ninth plague, darkness, to either a huge sandstorm or Rift Valley Fever, a cause of temporary blindness.

As might be expected, the final plague, the death of the firstborn, proved the most challenging to Marr and Malloy. But they rose to the occasion. In their scenario, the now-addled Egyptians desperately gathered what crops they could and stored them in damp grain silos (remember all that hail?). There the grain became moldy and developed deadly mycotoxins. The firstborn, traditionally benefiting from a double portion, received instead a double shot of poison and died in far greater numbers than their later-born brethren.

Concludes Marr, “Those who survived, seeing people dying all around them, must have thought it was an act of God.”

Readers interested in another take on the Ten Plagues should read the Zevit article. In addition to providing a different naturalistic explanation for the plagues, Zevit describes how the plague narrative can be taken as an attack on the Egyptian pantheon and then offers his own theory, which links the plagues to the story of Creation in Genesis.

019

Survival of the Fittest?

Americans believe in the Bible’s account of Creation—and we mean really believe.

A hefty 45 percent of us believe that God created man “pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years,” according to University of Cincinnati political science professor George Bishop. By comparison, only a paltry 7 percent of those surveyed in Great Britain accept the Genesis version of human origins. Other Europeans and Canadians also show much lower levels of acceptance of the biblical account than do Americans.

Another 40 percent of Americans believe that God guided man’s slow evolution from simpler forms of life, a concept called theistic evolution. Only 10 percent accept the Darwinian view that man evolved naturally over millions of years. Bishop noted, “Nearly a third of college graduates in recent Gallup polls still believe in the biblical account of creation.”

The countries whose religious beliefs most closely match those of America are Ireland and Northern Ireland, according to Bishop.

Bishop’s findings appeared in the August/September issue of Public Perspective. In his summary Bishop writes, “The scientific worldview has thus far failed to complete Darwin’s revolution in the land of ‘One Nation under God.’”

Wife of Bath Defeats Lot’s Wife

Chaucer trumps the Bible, at least in the overheated world of rare book collecting.

One of the first printed copies of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales took the title of world’s most expensive book this summer when Sir Paul Getty paid £4,621,500, or $7.53 million, for it at an auction in London. That beats the price of the previous most expensive book, a Gutenberg Bible that sold for $5.3 million in New York in 1987.

The Gutenberg Bible was printed in 1455. The Canterbury Tales was printed in either 1476 or 1477 by William Caxton, England’s first typographer. The last time the Tales was sold was in 1776, when it was auctioned by Christie’s for £6, or about $10. This time, Christie’s—again the auctioneers—estimated the sale price would be between $800,000 and $1.12 million, which proved an overly conservative estimate.

Getty, who became a naturalized Briton last year and has given more than $200 million to keep various art works in Britain, plans to keep the Tales at his estate library in England.

But Does It Have a Snooze Alarm?

Why be rudely awakened by the jolting ring of an ordinary alarm clock when you can be nudged out of your slumber by an inspirational message scrolling on the new Daily Insights clock by Seiko?

“Boast not thyself of tomorrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth” (Proverbs 27:1) is just one of the 365 Bible verses that appear on the Daily Insight’s display.

Making its debut just in time for the holiday gift-giving season, the clock features a monthly calendar and reminders for anniversaries and birthdays, as well as the time, date, day, month and year.

For ye of little faith, there is a one-year limited warranty.

019

Quoteworthy

“What have 50 years of studying, teaching, writing and editing manuscripts about the Bible taught me? What have I learned from the energy and effort I have expended on the text of the premier literary work of Western civilization? Chiefly, I have learned to be skeptical about claims (not least, but especially, my own), large and small, that purport to resolve a particular problem or settle a particular question. In fact, the larger the claim, the less likely it is to meet the requirements of evidence and argument. Even small claims rarely pass the tests of coherence and consistency, to say nothing of plausibility. Progress in understanding the Bible comes slowly, even in grasping the dimensions of the problems and the depth of our ignorance, much less in being able to make advances or to assess their value when we make them.”

David Noel Freedman (As slightly edited by his friend, the BR editor), from the preface to Divine Commitment and Human Obligation, Selected Writings of David Noel Freedman, ed. John R. Huddlestun.

The Plague’s the Thing

(Wherein We’ll Catch the Conscience of the Pharaoh)