Plague and pestilence in literature and art

by Sir Raymond Henry Payne Crawfurd

The arrows of pestilence have sunk deep into the tissue of many languages. Practically all the Hebrew words for plague (Maggefah, Negef, Naga, Makkah) indicate a blow. Our English ‘plague’ is derived through the Latin plaga from the Greek πληγή, a blow: so too the German plage. The French fléau—a flail or a plague—embodies the same idea of a blow, and is derived from the Latin flagellum and the Greek θλίβω. To-day even physicians must needs call the poisons of pestilence ‘toxines’, as though they were arrow-poisons discharged from a bow (τόξον from τυγχάνω = I hit). The Arabians speak of being ‘stung ’ or ‘pricked’ with plague, recalling respectively the serpents and the arrows of pestilence.

Passing allusion has been made above to the plagues of Pharaoh: it remains only to be said that there is now pretty general agreement that these ten plagues represent merely the seasonal variations, to which Egypt is peculiarly liable, magnified in Jewish oral tradition. Perhaps the last plague, the death of the first-born, at the April of the exodus (circa 1220 b.c.) may have been a true pestis puerorum, falling with chief severity on those who lacked the immunity afforded by a previous epidemic. It was the incursion of Libyans and of the nations of the Greek seas into Egypt, at least as much as the Biblical plagues, that enabled the Israelitish serfs to make good their escape.

During the period of wandering in the wilderness Korah, Dathan, and Abiram revolted against the ascendancy of Moses and Aaron, and God caused them to be swallowed up with all their households by an earthquake. Some of the children of Israel murmured against their fate. Those that did so were visited with a plague, that carried off 14,700 persons. The plague was stayed by Aaron offering incense as an atonement on the altar—sacrifice still, but the sacrifice only of a sweet savour to a God dwelling in heaven. The juxtaposition, if it be not permissible to say the association, of earthquake and pestilence in this narrative is noteworthy, in view of the widespread belief in their causal relationship, in later times.

All through the Old Testament plague is regarded, as here, as a direct consequence of God’s anger. In the New Testament it figures but little, and then rather as corrective than punitive. The God of the Old Testament is a God of vengeance: only in the later Prophets do we find even a foreshadowing of the God of love and forgiveness, the God of the New Testament. In portraying pestilence Art has retained this conception of God as a stern punisher of wrongdoing, but in the personality of Christ, approached through the mediation of the Madonna and Saints, has recognized the New Testament conception of God.

The entrance into Canaan was the beginning to the Israelites of a long period of warfare with surrounding tribes. At last, in the pitched battle of Eben-ezer, the Philistines crushed the army of Israel, captured the ark of the covenant, and carried it off to Ashdod, where they placed it in the temple of their own national god, Dagon. On two successive nights the image of Dagon was mysteriously thrown down from its pedestal. ‘The hand of the Lord was heavy upon them of Ashdod, and he destroyed them, and smote them with emerods, even Ashdod and the coasts thereof.’ The men of Ashdod made haste to send away the ark to Gath, another Philistine city, but here, too, God ‘smote the men of the city, both small and great, and they had emerods in their secret parts’. From Gath it was sent to Ekron with like result: ‘for there was a deadly destruction throughout all the city; the hand of God was very heavy there. And the men that died not were smitten with the emerods: and the cry of the city went up to heaven.’ After seven months of pestilence, the Philistines called for the priests and diviners, to inquire in what way they should send back the ark. These told them that, if they wished for deliverance from the plague, the ark must on no account be sent back empty, but with a trespass-offering of five golden emerods and five golden mice, ‘images of your emerods, and images of your mice that mar the land.’ The ark was to be sent in a new cart, drawn by two milch kine, while their calves were kept at home. If the kine took the straight way by the coast to Beth-shemesh, they would know that it was God that had smitten them, ‘but if not, then we shall know that it is not his hand that smote us: it was a chance that happened to us. And the men did so: and took two milch kine, and tied them to the cart, and shut up their calves at home: And they laid the ark of the Lord upon the cart, and the coffer with the mice of gold and the images of their emerods. And the kine took the straight way to the way of Beth-shemesh,and went along the highway, lowing as they went, and turned not aside to the right hand or to the left; and the lords of the Philistines went after them unto the border of Beth-shemesh. And they of Beth-shemesh were reaping their wheat-harvest in the valley: and they lifted up their eyes, and saw the ark, and rejoiced to see it. And the cart came into the field of Joshua, a Beth-shemite, and stood there, where there was a great stone: and they clave the wood of the cart, and offered the kine a burnt-offering unto the Lord. And the Levites took down the ark of the Lord, and the coffer that was with it, wherein the jewels of gold were, and put them on the great stone: and the men of Beth-shemesh offered burnt offerings and sacrificed sacrifices the same day unto the Lord ..., which stone remaineth unto this day in the field of Joshua, the Beth-shemite.’ Fifty thousand and seventy of the people of Beth-shemesh were smitten with the plague, ‘because they had looked into the ark of the Lord.’

In its essential features the narrative of this [plague of Ashdod] is a mere replica of the Homeric plague. The manifest cause is God’s displeasure, but when it falls on Israelites, God’s chosen people, as well as on Philistines, it is perplexing, for knowledge of contagion or communicability is as yet unborn. But an explanation is ready to hand—the Israelites also have offended God by looking into the ark. The sin-offerings are to be representations in gold of the disease, akin to the votive offerings of diseased parts dedicated in the sanctuaries of Asclepius, and representations of mice, which then and after were generally associated with pestilence—imitative magic again in its simplest form. The sacrificial stone is left as a commemorative altar for all time. Religion has now appeared to reinforce magic. The Philistine diviners do indeed hazard the thought that the plague may have been a mere ‘chance that happened to us’, and so faintly foreshadow a belief in the natural causation of epidemic disease.

Have we sufficient data to establish the identity of this contagious pestilence? It broke out on the sea-coast among a race of maritime traders, and spread from the coast to other inland towns. It lasted more than seven months. It took on two forms, a severe type with early death, and a less fatal type, in which swellings (so-called emerods) developed in the secret parts, a comprehensive term which habitually included the whole area adjacent to the genitals, and therein the groins. On these data alone it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it was true oriental plague, with a proportion of bubonic cases, a disease that throughout its recorded history has hugged this corner of the Levant.

Votive offerings for the healing of disease generally portrayed the part diseased, rather than the actual disease, the latter so often defying plastic representation. But, in the case of a simple swelling, it is natural that the disease itself should be modelled.

It is tempting to assert with confidence a direct causal connexion between the morbid swellings and the mice, for rats and mice were ill distinguished from each other until recent times. The matter is further complicated by the fact that there is considerable doubt as to the authenticity of parts, at least, of the narrative. The composition of the Books of Samuel ranged over some seven centuries, from 900-200 b.c., and the mouse story is believed to be a late interpolation, of which it is impossible to fix the date. But in the text, as it stands, the mice are designated ‘mice that mar the land’, and ancient literature abounds in records of appalling devastation of crops by the agency of field-mice. Aelian,[16] Aristotle,[17] Strabo,[18] Theophrastus, Pliny, and others testify to this. Loeffler[19] gives an account of a Thessalian corn-harvest destroyed by a horde of field-voles, a field being completely devastated in a single night. Mice were, in fact, one prominent cause of the famine-plagues[20] of history. Viewed in this light, it helps us to understand another Biblical pestilence, that fell on the army of Sennacherib, in 701 b.c., at Pelusium. This campaign of Sennacherib was undertaken to quell a general revolt of the western states against Assyrian supremacy and the payment of tribute to the Assyrian king. The revolt was fomented, seemingly, by Merodach-Baladan, whom Sargon had ousted from the kingship of Babylon, and who now drew Hezekiah into the revolt. He sent an embassy with gifts to Hezekiah, nominally to congratulate him on his recovery from a severe illness, which the Bible narrative terms ‘a boil’. This may perhaps indicate true pustular plague, but forms of boil (e. g. Baghdad boil), quite distinct from plague, are familiar occurrences in several regions of the East. Sennacherib first crushed Merodach-Baladan, and then advanced against Hezekiah, who at once called on Tirhaquah, the Ethiopian viceroy of Egypt, for help. At the pitched battle of Altaku Sennacherib defeated Tirhaquah, and shut up Hezekiah in Jerusalem, to which he proceeded to lay siege. Meantime Tirhaquah rallied his army and again advanced to the aid of Hezekiah, so that Sennacherib was compelled to march south against him. At Pelusium, on the border of Egypt, Sennacherib’s army was suddenly destroyed by a pestilence, that compelled him to withdraw the remnant at once to Assyria. ‘And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the Lord went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.’[21] Isaiah confirms in detail the narrative of the Book of Kings, and the Chaldaean chronicler, Berosus, in a fragment preserved by Josephus, states also that Sennacherib was driven back by pestilence. The prism inscriptions of Sennacherib are characteristically silent on the subject: they tell only how he shut up Hezekiah in Jerusalem, like a bird in a cage.

Pelusium has an evil reputation in the annals of pestilence. Procopius cites it as the starting-point of Justinian’s plague. There, too, one of the Crusading expeditions developed plague; and again, in a.d. 1799, the army of Napoleon was infected there and carried the disease into Syria. The explanation is not far to seek. The eastern and southern coasts of the Mediterranean, and more particularly Syria, Egypt, and Libya, were the points to which the merchants of the East brought their merchandise for exchange with that of the West. From time immemorial Arab caravans and camels had traversed well-worn trade routes from the East abutting on the Mediterranean at Tyre, Sidon, and Pelusium, and later at Alexandria. In these meeting-places of East and West, as also at Constantinople, plague would most readily, and actually did, find a footing. Possibly the eastern Delta may have been an endemic centre, but more likely, as was believed in the late Chinese plague, a distributing centre was an original source.