In the very nature of the case, these details could not have been comprehended by the scholars of the past generation, as they dealt with customs and ideas that were lost to our age. The insatiable curiosity of the archeologist, combined with the care with which the Egyptians preserved their records, can be credited with the recovery of this lost information, the possession of which so wonderfully establishes our faith in this more enlightened age.
CHAPTER IV
The Ten Plagues
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 SCIENCEScience 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.
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.
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.