The plagues were signs. Their purpose was to reveal, in a flash of pain and distress, that self-will and pride are contrary to the Divine order of the world, and destructive of all human well-being. It would seem as though the Almighty withdrew the restraints which, in the present time of discipline and probation, are holding back the immediate consequences of wrong-doing, so that men might be able to see what an evil thing sin is, and how terribly it injures their own best interests. For the most part, the processes of retribution are so gradual that we fail to connect them with their causes. For instance, in a vague way, we believe that luxury and debauchery ultimately destroy noble families, but, in our hurrying and migratory days, we do not stay long enough to be impressed with the certainty and terror of the Divine judgments. Given some overwhelming act of retribution, like the fate of Belshazzar on the night that Cyrus took Babylon, the heart of humanity instantly recognizes that there is One who judges in the earth.
As our bodies are affected by indulgence in sin, so probably the natural world, and even the brute creation, are powerfully influenced by the indulgence of human passion. Creation, says the Apostle, groans and travails together with man; the revelation of the sons of God is to inaugurate her emancipation from the bondage of corruption. The rending rocks and veiled heavens of the Crucifixion were the natural expression, in the earth-plane, of the love and hate which met in dread collision at Calvary. The prophet Jeremiah tells us that the land mourns and the herbs of a whole country wither for the wickedness of them that dwell in it, and that even the beasts and birds are consumed. It has never seemed remarkable that when the Puritan Commonwealth expired with Cromwell, so vast a revolution was accompanied by one of the most terrific storms that ever devastated Britain; or that on that momentous afternoon when the assembled conclave at the Vatican pronounced the dogma of Papal Infallibility, the reading of the decree was rendered almost inaudible by peals of reverberating thunder that shook the city.1 [Note: F. B. Meyer, Exodus (i.-xx.), 165.]
1. What judgment, however, are we to form with regard to the historical character of the plagues? The narratives, there are strong reasons for believing, were written long after the time of Moses, and do not do more than acquaint us with the traditions current among the Hebrews at the time when they were written; we consequently have no guarantee that they preserve exact recollections of the actual facts. That there is no basis of fact for the traditions which the narratives incorporate is in the highest degree improbable: we may feel very sure of this, and yet not feel sure that they describe the events exactly as they happened. “As the original nucleus of fact,” writes Dillmann, “we may suppose that at the time of Israel's deliverance Egypt was visited by various adverse natural occurrences, which the Israelites ascribed to the operation of their God, and by which their leaders, Moses and Aaron, sought to prove to the Egyptian court the superiority of their God over the king and gods of Egypt; it must, however, be admitted that in the Israelitish story these occurrences had for long been invested with a purely miraculous character. And if all had once been lifted up into the sphere of God's unlimited power, the compiler could feel no scruple in combining the different plagues mentioned in his sources into a series of ten, in such a manner as to depict, in a picture drawn with unfading colours, not only the abundance of resources which God has at His disposal for helping His own people, and humiliating those who resist His will, but also the slow and patient yet sure steps with which He proceeds against His foes, and the growth of evil in men till it becomes at last obstinate and confirmed.” The real value of the narratives, according to Dillmann, is thus not historical, but moral and religious. And from these points of view their typical and didactic significance cannot be overrated. The traditional story of the contest between Moses and Pharaoh is applied so as to depict, to use Dillmann's expression, “in unfading colours,” the impotence of man's strongest determination when it essays to contend with God, and the fruitlessness of all human efforts to frustrate His purposes.
Dr. Sanday-whose historical bias, if he has one, always leads him to conservative conclusions-has expressed himself recently on the subject, in an essay on the Symbolism of the Bible, in words which are well worth quoting: “The early chapters of Genesis are not the only portion of the Pentateuchal history to which I think that we may rightly apply the epithet ‘symbolical.' Indeed I suspect that the greater part of the Pentateuch would be rightly so described in greater or less degree. The narrative of the Pentateuch culminates in two great events, the Exodus from Egypt and the giving of the Law from Mount Sinai. What are we to say to any of these? Are they historical in the sense in which the Second Book of Samuel is historical? I think we may say that they are not. If we accept-as I at least feel constrained to accept, at least in broad outline-the critical theory now so widely held as to the composition of the Pentateuch, then there is a long interval, an interval of some four centuries or more, between the events and the main portions of the record as we now have it. In such a case we should expect to happen just what we find has happened. There is an element of folklore, of oral tradition insufficiently checked by writing. The imagination has been at work. If we compare, for instance, the narrative of the Ten Plagues with the narrative of the Revolt of Absalom, we shall feel the difference. The one is nature itself, with all the flexibility and easy sequence that we associate with nature. The other is constructed upon a scheme which is so symmetrical that we cannot help seeing that it is really artificial. I do not mean artificial in the sense that the writer, with no materials before him, sat down consciously and deliberately to invent them in the form they now have; but I mean that, as the story passed from mouth to mouth, it gradually and almost imperceptibly assumed its present shape.”
2. The question need no longer be pressed: Are the plagues to be regarded as miracles or are they not? The changed attitude of science to religion has changed the whole conception of the miraculous. Few of the recent forms of development in religious thought are more significant than that by which an approach has been made towards a truer perception of the relation in which religion stands to science. Time was when thinkers of the highest intellect and education allocated one portion of human thought to religion as its exclusive domain, and another to science. They were as rivals in adjacent kingdoms, neither of which might transgress each other's boundaries. And this mutual opposition was helped by the tendency to make religion equivalent at all points to “faith in the impossible,” while “science” was “knowledge of ascertained facts.” On each side were exponents who gloried in these respective definitions. The results produced upon the study of the Bible were disastrous. The plagues of Egypt, for example, were either miracles, portents, superhuman acts of God which faith must accept without reasoning, or they were purely natural phenomena. Religious people held the conclusion to which the Egyptian magicians came, that they were the working of the “Finger of God”; scientific people held that such a conclusion was as primitive as the magicians themselves. But this hostility is now rapidly passing away, as it is being more clearly recognized that religion embraces science as the greater includes the less; that nothing can lie outside the activity of the Infinite God; and therefore that to point out a connexion between some of the miracles of Scripture and natural phenomena does not eliminate from them the Divine element; it rather transfigures an unreasoning “faith in the impossible” into a faith which recognizes the Finger of God in everything, the providence of God in every event of national and individual life.
Great confusion of thought has resulted from the use of two words, miracle and supernatural; and the meanings of these words have been so twisted that false standards of thought have arisen. We must remember that a miracle is a thing wondered at, without any reference necessarily to non-natural action; everything we admire is literally a miracle. In the good old words, anything unusual was taken to be “a sign and wonder,” a thing which was viewed as a token of interposition in human affairs, and therefore a matter of astonishment. But the notion of such a phrase implying non-natural action has only grown up with the modern view of natural law. To most ages of mankind there was no dividing line between natural and non-natural; so much is inexplicable to the untrained mind that no trouble was taken to define whether an event would happen in the natural course or not. And events which were well known to be purely in the natural course were viewed as occurring at a special time in order to influence human affairs. As a Rumanian Jew said to me, “I come from a land where miracles happen every day; there is no difficulty about miracles.” His countrymen have still the antique mind, which views events as wonders fitted to their daily life. To transfer the statements and views of people in that frame of mind into the precise phraseology of the present age-when the infinitesimal variations of natural laws are the passion of men's lives-is completely hopeless and absurd. To take a parallel case, unless we renounce volition and proclaim ourselves helpless automata, we must recognize the forces of our wills which control nature. Yet these are beyond the grasp of modern phraseology, and we can no more translate all our mental processes into automatic formulæ than we can translate the records of the Old Testament into purely modern views. The other word which has done so much harm is supernatural, because it is used for two ideas which we have learned in modern times to carefully keep apart. When the extent of natural law was but little understood, the difference between co-natural action and non-natural action was dimly seen and little regarded. To those who have learned to see in so much of nature the systems of definite cause and effect, this difference is vital; and to continue to use one word with two entirely different meanings is an incessant obstacle to thought. The larger question of non-natural action is outside the scope of these inquiries; all of the events in the records which we touch on here are expressly referred by their writers to co-natural action. A strong east wind drives the Red Sea back; another wind blows up a flock of quails; cutting a rock brings a water supply to view; and the writers of these accounts record such matters as wondrous benefits of the timely action of natural causes.1 [Note: W. M. F. Petrie, Researches in Sinai, 201.]
At different times Signor and Lord Tennyson had confided to each their conclusions upon religious beliefs, and Signor told me he had found that their ideas were identical. The world cannot get on without a personal God. One whose law is stronger than himself is conceivable-He may know that this is best. The Greeks perceived this truth and called the law “the Fates.” The Hebrew conception of a god who can break his own laws to exhibit his power is not so convincing of greatness as is the Power that works within a self-imposed order for higher purposes than the human mind can comprehend. “The Divine Essence is the law Himself; He can no more break a law than He can do away with Himself. This has been perceived in part, for in the earliest miracles, such as the feeding of Elijah in the desert, God does not enable him to do without food, as Omnipotence certainly could have done, but uses means to give him that food.”2 [Note: George Frederic Watts, ii. 165.]
3. It is important to notice that the plagues all stand in close connexion with the natural conditions of Egypt, and, as represented in the narrative, are in fact just miraculously intensified forms of the diseases or other natural occurrences to which the country is still more or less liable. Every June, when the annual inundation begins, the Nile assumes a reddish colour, due to the red marl brought down from the Abyssinian mountains. Frogs, gnats, flies, and locusts are common pests of the country. Destructive murrains or cattle plagues have occurred in Egypt during the last century. Cutaneous eruptions (“boils”) are common there. Hailstones, accompanied by lightning, though unusual, are not unknown. The darkness was probably the result of the hot wind called the Hamsin, which blows at intervals for nearly two months every year, frequently fills the air with thick clouds of dust and sand, and obliges people, while it lasts, to remain indoors. Malignant epidemics, accompanied sometimes by great mortality, are frequently mentioned by historians and travellers.
There was nothing in the plagues themselves that was either supernatural or contra-natural. They were all characteristic of Egypt and of Egypt alone. They were signs and wonders, not because they introduced new and unknown forces into the life of the Egyptians, but because the diseases and plagues already known to the country were intensified in action and crowded into a short space of time.1 [Note: A. H. Sayce, Early History of the Hebrews, 169.]
If Professor Sayce knew India as well as he knows Egypt, he would not say that these plagues were characteristic of Egypt alone. India's present representatives of the plagues leave Egypt nowhere in the competition. Snakes, frogs, lice, flies, cattle-plague, boils, hail, sand-storms and cholera are at home in India. Rivers that turn red in flood are on a larger scale and sand-storms are more dense in India than in Egypt. But it is difficult to understand how cholera, looked on as a purely natural cause, could account for the death of the firstborn in one night. What, however, cannot be accepted in any wise is the suggestion that the annual phenomenon of the Nile flood could be looked upon as a plague. The “red water” (as it is called by the natives, though the colour would be more correctly described as deep chocolate) arrives in Egypt annually in August and September, and is highly valued for its fertilizing properties by all landowners. A traveller in Egypt gives an account of a festival in honour of the rise of the flood in a.d. 1047, and describes how crowds bathed in the turbid waters of the flood in the belief that the water of their sacred river had, at the time of the full rise, virtue to cure the sick, to strengthen the young and weak, and to make the barren woman a joyful mother of children. If a thousand years ago the red flood water was looked upon as a blessing, it is a thing inconceivable that three thousand years ago the Egyptians, after experience of seven years' famine and seven years' plenty, if they had had no other experience, should have been so unobservant as not to reckon the red water of the flood a blessing too. This suggestion, then, must be rejected as the explanation of the plague of water being turned into blood so that the fish died and the people could not drink of it. “Red” Nile water has no harmful effect on fish, or on those that drink it.2 [Note: R. H. Brown, The Land of Goshen, 65.]
4. When we examine the plagues in detail, we discover that it is no arbitrary fancy which divides them into three triplets, leading up to the appalling tenth. Thus the first, fourth, and seventh, each of which begins a triplet, are introduced by a command to Moses to warn Pharaoh “in the morning” (Exo_7:15), or “early in the morning” (Exo_8:20; Exo_9:13). The third, sixth, and ninth, on the contrary, are inflicted without any warning whatever. The story of the third plague closes with the defeat of the magicians, the sixth with their inability to stand before the king, and the ninth with the final rupture, when Moses declares, “I will see thy face again no more” (Exo_8:19; Exo_9:11; Exo_10:29). The first three are plagues of loathsomeness-bloodstained waters, frogs, and lice; the next three bring actual pain and loss with them-stinging flies, murrain which afflicts the beasts, and boils upon all the Egyptians; and the third triplet are “nature-plagues”-hail, locusts, and darkness. It is only after the first three plagues that the immunity of Israel is mentioned; and after the next three, when the hail is threatened, instructions are first given by which those Egyptians who fear Jehovah may also obtain protection. Thus, in orderly and solemn procession, marched the avengers of God upon the guilty land.
5. The tenth plague stands by itself. It is the death of the firstborn. The death of the firstborn was the great climax, reached gradually and in growing severity. From the first this was set forth as the penalty of Pharaoh's refusal to let Israel go. Before Moses had set out for Egypt this was given to him as the message from God: “Thou shalt say unto Pharaoh, Thus saith the Lord, Israel is my son, even my firstborn; and I say unto thee, Let my son go, that he may serve me; and if thou refuse to let him go, behold, I will slay thy son, even thy firstborn.” Nine plagues had already come upon the land: but hitherto the power of God had been shown by punishing rather than by destroying. More and more severe became these plagues until the cattle and the persons of the Egyptians began to be stricken, and in the plague of the hail those that refused to heed the voice of Moses and to seek shelter were slain. Then came the plague of darkness. Nothing produced so deep an impression upon the king and people as did this, and certainly none was so terrible.
(1) The first thing to be observed in the passage which contains the account of the tenth plague (Exo_11:1-10) is that it interposes a solemn pause between the preceding ineffectual plagues and the last effectual one. There is an awful lull in the storm before the last crashing hurricane which lays every obstacle flat. “There is silence in heaven” before the final peal of thunder.
(2) One cannot but note in Moses' prediction of the last plague the solemn enlargement on the details of the widespread calamity, which is not unfeeling gloating over an oppressor's misery, but a yearning to save from hideous misery by timely and plain depicting of it. There is a flash of national triumph in the further contrast between the universal wailing in Egypt and the untouched security of the children of Israel, but that feeling merges at once into the higher one of the Lord's gracious action in establishing the difference between them and their oppressors.
I grant you that the destruction of the Egyptian firstborn and that of Pharaoh's host in the Red Sea are startling and awful events, as the perishing of any number of human beings by any hurricane, pestilence, shipwreck, must be. Why do you think these more so than others? Is it because you have arrived at some knowledge of the future condition of these particular sufferers, which you have not in the other case? How did you arrive at it? The Bible tells you nothing about it. We merely hear that the firstborn died, that the hosts of the Egyptians went down into the sea. I know nothing more of them, except that they are not gone out of God's sight because they are gone out of mine, and that the judge of all the earth will do right. The Bible gives me that assurance. I find it a very soothing and comforting one. I could not bear to look upon the facts which are passing every day before our eyes if I had not this assurance. The belief that the Egyptians were drowned as much as the Israelites were saved, because “the mercy of the Lord endureth for ever,” can help me to look upon problems which I have no skill to solve, without horror, nay, with confidence and hope. Take away that belief,-give us no hint, no example to guide us in considering the ways of God to His creatures,-and we should sink back into the conclusions which we all feel to be so natural to us, which all men without help have sunk into. The predominance of evil would lead us to think that it is the everlasting law of the world instead of the transgression and violation of its law.1 [Note: F. D. Maurice, The Patriarchs and Lawgivers of the Old Testament, 195.]
In vain we judgments feel, and wonders see;
In vain did God to descend hither deign,
He was His own ambassador in vain,
Our Moses and our guide Himself to be.
We will not let ourselves to go,
And with worse harden'd hearts, do our own Pharaohs grow;
Ah! lest at last we perish so.
Think, stubborn Man! think of th' Egyptian prince,
(Hard of belief and will, but not so hard as thou)
Think with what dreadful proofs God did convince
The feeble arguments that human pow'r could shew;
Think what plagues attend on thee,
Who Moses' God dost now refuse more oft than Moses Heb_1:1-14 [Note: A. Cowley, Pindaric Odes.]
