Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

PLAGUE

A general term for a judgment, usually inflicted by God. Sometimes used to refer to what is now understood as epidemic disease (e.g., 1 Sam. 6:4), it usually designates a more comprehensive range of calamities including endemic disease, battle casualties, and natural disasters (e.g., 1 Kgs. 8:37). The 10 plagues of Egypt, rarely called plagues in Exodus itself (Exod. 9:3, 14-15; 11:1), are more frequently known as signs and wonders (e.g., 7:3; Deut. 6:22; 7:19; 26:8; 34:11; Neh. 9:10; Ps. 135:9; Jer. 32:20-21) and judgments (Exod. 6:6; Num. 33:4).

The English word is used to translate a number of Hebrew and Greek terms. The Hebrew verb nāgap and nouns maggēpâ, negep, and makkâ, lit., “hit,” “strike,” or “touch,” indicating injury, a fatal blow, slaughter in battle, or military defeat, are often translated synonymously as “plague.” Gk. plēgḗ is translated “plague” in Revelation, and mástix as “plague” (KJV Mark 5:29, 34) or “disease” in the Gospels, but elsewhere mean “beating” or “flogging.” The emphasis here may be on the calamity’s sudden and unusual onset. An epidemic or outbreak of acute infectious disease may be described only in some instances (Exod. 32; Num. 16, 25; 1 Sam. 5–6; cf. Zech. 14:12, 15, 18).

Heb. deḇer (usually translated “pestilence”) always refers to an outbreak of disease. The triad “sword, famine, and pestilence,” found frequently in Jeremiah and Ezekiel, describes the devastating effect of depleted food supplies and polluted water associated with siege warfare. Likewise, Gk. loimós indicates a severe disease with a high mortality affecting large numbers of people at the same time (Luke 21:1).

Heb. negaʿ (KJV “plague”; RSV “disease”) refers in Lev. 13–14 to various skin disorders (not Hansen’s disease, as the traditional translation “leprosy” seems to indicate), and to rot in clothing and houses. Heb. rešep, apparently cognate to the name of the Canaanite god of plague, is personified in Hab. 3:5 (RSV); Deut. 32:24 (NJPSV), as is deḇer in Ps. 91:6.

Where epidemic disease seems to be indicated, it is still extremely difficult to read modern medical diagnoses into the biblical text in order to pinpoint specific diseases. A possible exception is the plague on the Philistines (1 Sam. 5–6): here an infestation of rats or mice coupled with a disease involving swellings may describe bubonic plague. However, even here other diseases such as dysentery have been postulated, and the LXX seems to suggest that the plague is exclusively one of mice.

Plague, in its more restricted meaning of disease, was a prevalent fact of life in the ancient Near East. Endemic disease, in the absence of effective treatment and exacerbated by urbanization and inadequate diet and sanitation, accounted for at least half of all deaths; warfare and epidemics, events that were often related, caused a further increase in mortality rates. Ancient Near Eastern texts show an awareness of epidemic diseases (e.g., the plague prayers of the Hittite king Mursilis; ANET, 394-96), attributing them to various deities or demons. Likewise, in the Bible it is God who brings or threatens plague.

Plague first appears in the Bible in Gen. 12:17 as a divine punishment of Pharaoh for taking Sarai, Abram’s wife, into his harem. The Israelites experience plague in the wilderness because of their apostasy with the golden calf (Exod. 32:35), their craving for meat (Num. 11:33), their complaints and rebellion (14:37; 16:41-50), and their worship of the Baal of Peor (25:9). They are threatened with plague if they break the covenant with their God (Lev. 26:21, 25; Num. 14:12; Deut. 28:21, 58-61). David chooses a three-day pestilence as punishment for his census (2 Sam. 24; 1 Chr. 21), and Solomon’s prayer at the dedication of the temple lists plague as a possible consequence of covenant disloyalty (1 Kgs. 8:37 = 2 Chr. 6:28). The arrival of God is associated with plague in Hab. 3:5.

The Philistines, upon capturing the ark of the covenant, suffer a plague (1 Sam. 5:6, 11; cf. Ps. 32:4) underlining the sovereignty of Israel’s god Yahweh over the Philistine Dagon (1 Sam. 5:4). The same kind of contest appears in the 10 plagues of Egypt, where Yahweh’s sovereignty must be established over against Pharaoh (Exod. 9:3).

Plagues of Egypt

Egypt is associated preeminently with the plagues of Exod. 7–12. The traditional enumeration of 10 plagues does not appear in Exodus and is first explicitly attested in the book of Jubilees (Jub. 48:7). The accounts in Pss. 78, 105 seem to list only seven or eight plagues, and in different order. The meditation on the plagues in the Wisdom of Solomon (Wis. 11–19) presents seven contrasts between the treatment of Egypt and Israel at the hands of God (cf. Rev. 8–11, 15–16).

The 10 plagues are (1) blood; (2) frogs; (3) gnats; (4) flies; (5) livestock pestilence; (6) boils; (7) hail; (8) locusts; (9) darkness; (10) death of the firstborn. The nature of the third and fourth plagues is especially uncertain; the kinnim or gnats (RSV) of Exod. 8:16-18(MT 12-14) have also been understood as lice (NJPSV) or maggots (NEB), and the ʿārōḇ (lit., “mixture”) or swarms of flies (RSV) of 8:20-32(16-28) could be a swarm of a number of insects (NJPSV) or, as in rabbinic literature, wild animals.

Complex variations between the presentation of the individual plagues, such as the fluctuation between Moses, Aaron, and God as the agent who induces each plague or the erratic reactions of Pharaoh to the individual plagues, as well as discrepancies such as the reappearance of Egyptian livestock in the seventh plague after they have all died in the fifth (Exod. 9:6), have led to the theory that the Exodus narrative is a composite of several traditions. In its classic formulation, an early account of seven plagues (usually identified with J) was gradually combined with, or supplemented by, other sources or traditions, finally giving shape to the present 10-plague account.

Against this source-critical approach, others have stressed the unitive structure and balance of the plague narrative in its completed form. Already recognized by the medieval rabbinic commentators was a formulaic pattern of three triplets of plagues (1, 2, 3 + 4, 5, 6 + 7, 8, 9) capped by a further 10th plague. (This is similar to the 3 + 3 + 1 pattern of the Creation account in Gen. 1.) Another commonly recognized pattern is that of five contiguous pairs, based on content: 1, 2 (Nile); 3, 4 (insects); 5, 6 (diseases); 7, 8 (crop damage); 9, 10 (darkness).

The 10 plagues have also been interpreted as a sequence of catastrophic natural phenomena exhibiting a scientific cause-and-effect relationship. Thus, reddish-colored mud and algae turned the Nile blood-red (1), killing the fish and causing the frogs to migrate onto land (2). The dead frogs provided a breeding ground for gnats and flies (3 and 4), which in turn transmitted diseases to livestock and humans (5 and 6). Hail and locusts (7 and 8) were common natural disasters, while the darkness of the ninth plague was caused by a sandstorm or solar eclipse. Such naturalizing explanations, however, not only stumble over details such as the selective or instantaneous nature of some of the plagues, but they also discredit the ideological depiction of the plagues in the biblical narrative as clearly supernatural or miraculous events happening by divine instigation.

Two major themes stand out in the narrative of the 10 plagues: “that you may know that there is no one like the Lord our God” (Exod. 8:10[6]; cf. 9:14), and “that you may know that the Lord makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel” (11:7). The plagues demonstrate the superiority of Israel’s God over an Egypt which, under its semidivine Pharaoh, increasingly reverts to a pre-creational state of chaos. At the same time, the plagues are the birthing of Israel as a separate or distinct entity from its Egyptian matrix.

Bibliography. T. E. Fretheim, “The Plagues as Ecological Signs of Historical Disaster,” JBL 110 (1991): 385-96; R. M. Martinez, “Epidemic Disease, Ecology, and Culture in the Ancient Near East,” in The Bible in the Light of Cuneiform Literature, ed. W. H. Hallo, B. W. Jones, and G. L. Mattingly. Scripture in Context 3 (Lewiston, 1990), 413-57.

F. V. Greifenhagen

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

PLAGUE

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)