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
SCIENCE
Science 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.
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.
It is interesting to see that this old error is in no new guise, in the
article referred to above. This is nothing new, it is just an original
approach to the same old mess of Satanic whispering. Indeed, Paul warned
us of the possibility of this very article and method in II Timothy 3:8,
when he said:
Now as Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses, so do these also resist the
truth: men of corrupt minds, reprobate concerning the faith.
He introduces the very age of Egyptian history, and the events connected
with the Exodus in speaking thus of the false teachers of the apostate
days that should precede the time of our Lord’s return. And lo! the
event transpires in this year of grace, as the press of the twentieth
century casts doubt upon the Ten Plagues in this subtle manner.
It _is_ subtle. Also dishonest to the nth degree. Professing to accept
the historicity of the events, the article then proceeds to demolish the
credibility of the record, by ascribing all the plagues to natural
forces, directed by the genius of a human being, namely, Moses. God is
ruled out, the supernatural denied, and common sense prostituted to
infidelity in a manner that the shallowest thinker could not
countenance. For a man of medicine, or a scholar in any realm of
science, to foster such a contemptible evasion of plain fact, passes
understanding.
A few years ago it was customary for criticism to deny that these
plagues ever happened. Classifying them among the reputed folklore of
the Hebrews, and relegating them to the realm of the purely
mythological, the critic calmly and boldly denied that they ever
occurred at all. But these past years of research and study have so
established the historicity of the record, that this procedure is no
longer possible; so the new attack is made, on the basis of naturalism.
It is plainly stated that Moses himself brought about these plagues upon
the Egyptians, and that he did so by the use of his own superior
knowledge. In a word, he was a bacteriologist, three and a half thousand
years before Pasteur! That in itself is a greater miracle than the
plagues could ever have been! No microscope, no instruments of research,
yet he not only anticipated the discoveries of Lister and Pasteur, but
he also applied _germ warfare_ to the redemption of Israel, and “bent
the Egyptians to _his_ will.”
More marvelous than all this, he did it by simply polluting the Nile
River, the source of the life of Egypt. This of course was a simple
task! The Nile is a mighty river. If we follow its course just from the
First Cataract at Assuan to the mouth, it is over five hundred miles as
the river twists and bends round and about.
Now all Moses had to do was to impregnate those five hundred miles of
winding river with some deadly form of disease germs, that would affect
the Egyptians _but not the Israelites_! Any nice germ would do! Of
course, he had also to _keep_ those five hundred miles of flowing stream
polluted, in spite of the rushing current that swept fresh water down
day by day! Let us not forget, _that he did all this while Pharaoh was
looking on_: and that for seven days the condition continued, then to
end as suddenly as it had begun. We should like to know something of his
technique!
Then, after the river had cleared its waters, Moses boldly announced
that the Lord would overrun the land with frogs! This was done, not as a
result of a polluted river, but rather after the river was clear.
Pollution with disease germs might have driven the frogs out of the
river: but how did Moses get them to go _back_, as Pharaoh entreated him
to do?
Most conveniently, the author of the above cited article does not
mention how the lice were spread over the land by Moses! Did he
personally catch them and spread them all around, or had he been
breeding and storing them for years in advance? The flies may have
increased in the rotting piles of frogs, but what kept this pest of
flies out of the small section of Egypt called the Land of Goshen, where
the children of Israel were? Given the conditions that caused the flies
to breed, why did they refrain from the particular portion of the land
where Moses and his people were camping?
So also for the murrain on the cattle, and the boils on the Egyptians.
None of Israel were affected by these disasters. Did Moses have some
kind of salve or prophylactic serum that he used, he being the great
medical genius that this article makes him to be? Even that will not
account for the fact that when the hail came, it, also, avoided the camp
of Moses and his three and a half million compatriots!
But even a great medical genius and an accomplished meteorologist could
not have foreseen the coming of the locusts that darkened the sky and
the land as well. Nor could this great medical genius, even had he also
been an able entomologist, have seen to it that the locusts ate only
Egyptian vegetation, as Goshen greenery would have been just as
acceptable to _hungry_ locusts! And who ever saw any other kind?
Passing over the supernatural darkness with the simple observation that
it was _not_ an ordinary phenomenon such as a sandstorm (which left the
houses of the Israelites unaffected), we will hasten to the conclusion
of the matter, the death of the first-born. The article we are quoting
makes a terribly strained attempt to prove that others died as well as
the first-born, but the text of the Scripture does not so state or
imply. Indeed, the text very clearly sets forth the fact that it was
only the first-born who died. They died dramatically; all at the same
hour.
At midnight, simultaneously, death smote a certain restricted class.
The prince in the palace, and the felon in the dungeon; the cattle as
well.
_But the first-born of Israel did not die!
They were all under the blood!_
Quaint epidemic, was it not? It came as a result of disease germs in the
river Nile, it killed all its victims out of just one class, the
first-born, and it passed over any home that had lamb’s blood on the
door posts!
Is it necessary for a man to believe such arrant nonsense, and accept
such utterances of folly before he can qualify as an educated man, or a
scientist?
Most fortunately, it is not!
To show the truth of this matter, we can indeed study these ten plagues
in the light of modern science. Not by the flickering rays of the lamp
of human speculation can understanding be achieved. Only in the full
illumination of the sunshine of historical fact can the truth be
discerned. So, we will turn to the great and truly modern science of
archeology to study the Ten Plagues of Egypt, and see what the truth of
the matter really is.
In the first place, thanks to the vast amount of research in the
archeology of Egypt, we now know that these ten plagues were a contest
between the Lord God of the Israelites, and the pantheon of Egypt.
The genesis of the contest is given in Exodus 3:18. Here Moses is
instructed by God to ask Pharaoh for a three-day furlough for the entire
company of the Twelve Tribes, that they might go three days’ journey
into the wilderness, and sacrifice to Jehovah. This initial request was
to be the first step in a campaign that would result in the redemption
of Israel from their long bondage, and the apparently reasonable request
was made with the certainty that it would be refused. Indeed, the
request was such that Pharaoh _could not grant it_!
As we shall later see, the Egyptians were the most polytheistic nation
that ever lived. In their pantheon of deities there were more than
twenty-two hundred gods and goddesses, and each of them had a particular
theophany. That is to say, these gods and goddesses had certain animals
that were sacred to them, and in which animal form the particular god or
goddess occasionally manifested a personal presence. So very often the
deities of Egypt are depicted in stone and painting as having a human
body, but an animal head. Thus Thoth might be seen with the head of an
ibis, while Hathor sometimes has a human head, but more often she is
portrayed with the head of a cow.
So there was no animal that the Hebrews could sacrifice to their God,
Jehovah, that would not be sacred to some Egyptian deity. This sacrifice
would constitute blasphemy in the eyes of the Egyptian masters, and
trouble would eventuate immediately! Indeed, when Pharaoh, worn out by
the troubles brought upon him by the plagues, suggested to Moses that
the people sacrifice to Jehovah without going to the wilderness, Moses
simply replied in the language that is recorded in Exodus 8:26:
“What shall we sacrifice, that will not be an abomination in the eyes
of the Egyptians? Will they not stone the people if they sacrifice in
the land?”
The justice of the reply was so self-apparent that the ruler did not
press his suggestion, as the text shows. Thus God forced the issue and
provoked the conflict that not only freed His people from slavery and
eventually established them in the land that He had promised them
through Abraham, but also showed His supremacy over the gods of Egypt.
Even more than that, in the resultant series of events, the Lord God
brought such glory to His own Name, and showed such omnipotence that the
world has never forgotten this drama, even to our own day and time.
Witness the very article that is the subject of this present comment!
The clear statement of God’s attitude toward the conflict is seen in
Exodus 4:23, 24. The figure of speech used there is a divine choice,
therefore we use it just as God Himself expressed His own mind to Moses.
The “first-born” was the chief object of interest in every Egyptian
household, for two reasons. The law of primogeniture ruled in that day
and land, even as it does in England and other countries today. Also,
the first-born of every species, animal or human, was dedicated to the
gods, and was a sacred object, in a very strong sense of that word. So
later, we hear the law of Israel as set forth by God, that the
first-born of man or beast in the land is to be sacred to Jehovah: _not_
to the gods of Egypt.
Now then, as Moses was sent to Pharaoh, to carry the demands of God for
the release of the people, he was instructed to tell the ruler that
Israel was, in God’s sight, as prized and beloved a group as the
“first-born” was in an Egyptian household. In a figure of speech that
Egypt as a whole could most clearly grasp, God said: “Israel is _My_
son, _My first-born_: And I have said unto thee, Let my son go that he
may serve me; and thou hast refused to let him go; behold, I will slay
_thy_ son, _thy_ first-born.”
With this introduction, we can see clearly the genesis of the conflict.
It is most clearly stated in Exodus 5:1-3. When Moses said to Pharaoh,
“Thus saith Jehovah, the God of Israel, Let my people go, that they may
hold a feast unto Me in the _wilderness_:” the ruler of the land said,
in just so many words, “Who is Jehovah? I never heard of him!” Not only
did the mighty king reject the word and the commands of God, but he also
denied Him in no uncertain terms. This upstart Jehovah, who was _He_ to
give orders to Pharaoh the mighty? He was the god of an humbled and
captive people, therefore the king reasoned that his own gods must be
far mightier! So the proud and haughty monarch said, “I’ll stick by the
gods of Egypt; I know not this Jehovah, and I will not obey His words.”
Moses left with the clearly expressed warning that the king might not
then know Jehovah, but that he was certainly destined to find out about
Him! The call to arms, the challenge to combat, and the prophecy of
God’s victory are all expressed in the single verse in Exodus the
seventh chapter, where God tells Moses that “the Egyptians shall know
that I am Jehovah, when I stretch out my hand upon Egypt....” This,
then, was the primary reason for the ten plagues. God would teach the
Egyptians a lesson through _judgments_ that the land would never forget!
When he finished with them, none were ever again able to say, “And who
is this Jehovah? The gods of Egypt are stronger.”
Thus we see that the contest was primarily between the monotheism of
Israel and polytheism of Egypt. We would emphasize the fact that the
Egyptians were perhaps the most polytheistic race the world has so far
known. It is impossible to say just how many deities existed to the
Egyptian mind, but “their name was legion”! Two hundred separate deities
are named in the Pyramid Text, and four hundred and eighty more are
named in the Theban Recension of the Book of the Dead. Altogether,
archeologists have recovered the names of over two thousand two hundred
different gods and goddesses that were worshipped by the Egyptians! Is
it any wonder that Jehovah must start His laws to His people with the
commandment: “Thou shalt have no other _gods_ before me!”?
A word about these objects of Egyptian worship will be necessary to
clear up the necessary later references to the practices and the beliefs
of the Egyptians. While these ancient folks never had the idea of an
immanent, pervasive God, in the monotheistic sense, they still had a dim
conception of a super-god principle, behind and over the various
individual gods and goddesses. There was first of all the grouping of
gods into triads, which was a widely accepted custom. Since each triad
consisted of a god, a wife, and a son, this grouping is less a
degeneration of the principle of the Trinity than might seem to be
suggested at first thought. Rather, it was a glorification of the
_family_ principle.
Thus we see that at Thebes, the principal triad of deities consists of
Amon-Ra, the king of all the gods, Mut, his Wife, and Khons, their son.
Ba-neb-Ded, with his wife Het-mehit, and their son Harpakhrad (whom the
Greeks later called Harpokrates) constituted the triad at Mendes. In
like manner, the Memphis triad was composed of Ptah, Sekhmet, and
Imhotep. Sometimes the greater gods were grouped into a company of nine,
called the Ennead. There was also the grouping of the major deities into
the “Three Companies,” being the gods of the heaven, the earth, and the
Other or Under World.
All the gods had human bodies, but some of them had animal heads.
Sometimes a god who customarily had a human head would appear wearing
the animal head of his theophany, as in the case of Hathor, cited above.
Thus when Hathor appears with a cow’s head upon a human body, she
appears with the solar disk between her horns; and when she appears with
the human head, she wears as a headdress the bonnet of the goddess Mut,
the wife of Amon-Ra, the horns of the cow, the solar disk which shows
her relationship to Horus, and the feather of the goddess Maat.
We have previously asserted that each plague was a direct blow at one of
these celestial beings, and it might be profitable to demonstrate this
fact with a few concrete illustrations.
[Illustration: Hapi]
The First Plague was a direct and definite blow at a numerous company of
these objects of worship. In the first place, the River Nile was itself
an object of worship. It was reputed to flow from the celestial stream
called Nu, and was heavenly in its origin. It brought life to the entire
land of Egypt, and was worshipped with appropriate and very exact
ritual. There were hymns to the Nile, prayers and offerings to and for
the Nile, and the river possessed in itself a very real personality. The
River is pictured in the form of a man wearing a cluster of water plants
upon his head, and the idea of fertility is conveyed by giving him the
heavy pendant breasts of a nursing mother! In the British Museum may be
seen a remarkable papyrus, containing the Hymn to the Nile. To show the
reverence felt for the power of the great River, we quote just a
sentence or two from this Hymn:
... Thou art the Lord of the poor and needy. If thou wert overthrown
in the heavens, the gods would fall upon their faces, and men would
perish....
This deified river, then, the source of life and blessing in Egypt, was
smitten by God, and its waters turned to blood. Frantically the
Egyptians sought to dig shallow wells by the banks of the stream, as
their water supply failed them for the first time in the memory of man!
Truly, Jehovah was greater than the Nile! And not only greater than the
River itself, there was more than this involved. There were many issues
involved, and many deities suffered “loss of face” that day!
[Illustration: Osiris]
There was the mighty Osiris, who was himself the cause and source of the
resurrection and of everlasting life. Greatest of all the gods of the
underworld, he has an important part in the text of the Book of the
Dead. The Nile was supposed to be his bloodstream! When God smote the
Nile, he laid the mighty Osiris low in the dust! With him fell Hapi—who
was the Nile-god, and also Satet, the wife of Khnemu, the goddess of the
annual inundation. Her divine sister, Anqet, bit the dust that day, as
she was the personification of the Nile waters, which turned into an
offense and a stench when Moses stretched out his staff. Time will not
permit the presentation of the characters of Isis-Sothis, Isis-Hathor,
Ament, Menat, Renpit and at least two score more, all of whom met defeat
in the First Plague. None of them could sustain their prestige and power
in the face of the action of Jehovah, and He emerged victorious in the
first trial of strength.
[Illustration: Khnum]
The Second Plague was likewise a contest between the Lord of the heavens
and the earth, and certain specific ideas of the Egyptian system of
worship. The plague of frogs that covered the land, making life a burden
to the people, was a blow struck at Heqt, the wife of the great Khnum,
whose theophany was a frog. Indeed, she was called the “frog-goddess,”
and this lowly creature was sacred to her. The frog was the symbol of
the resurrection, and the emblem of fertility. It was reverenced by the
people, and to have one around the dwelling place was a sign of good
fortune and was supposed to ensure a fertile year for farm and family
alike.
They got enough of this quaint object of reverence when God flooded
their land with myriads of the beastly things! They were in the
bread-trough, and got tangled up in the dough, thus adding a rather
quaint flavor to the bread! The bread could not be baked, however, as
the baking ovens crawled with frogs, and the fires could not be lighted.
They hopped all over the master of the house, and when he sought his bed
in disgust they were there before him.
Like a blanket of filth the slimy, wet monstrosities covered the land,
until men sickened at the continued squashing crunch of the ghastly
pavement they were forced to walk upon. If a man’s feet slipped on the
greasy mass of their crushed bodies, he fell into an indescribably
offensive mass of putrid uncleanness, and when he sought water to
cleanse himself, the water was so solid with frogs, he got no cleansing
there. In sheer desperation the mighty king was forced to beg, “Call off
your frogs, and I will let the people go!” Read Exodus 8:1-15.
And with that cry, the prestige of Heqt and Khnum was gone forever,
drowned out in the tidal wave of disgust that rolled up in protest at
_too much_ of her theophany!
It is a bit difficult to imagine that generation of Egyptians ever
worshipping the Frog again.
Plagues Three and Four are a bit more difficult to deal with at the
present writing, because of the personal ignorance of the writer. By
that he means to say that more light is required here as he does not
know definitely the exact god that was meant to suffer in the estimation
of the people, with the plague of lice. There can be no question,
however, that the people themselves were hard hit, as any veteran of the
A. E. F. will be only too glad to testify! This unclean parasite must
have been a source of misery that was well-nigh insuperable, when it
became as numerous as the very dust of the ground! It must have made the
Egyptians somewhat envious to see the Israelites basking in peace and
bodily comfort, while they, the lords of the land, itched and scratched
and suffered the misery of this vicious pest! How much better to trust
the God Jehovah who demonstrated His ability to keep His followers free
from even such a plague as this.
As for the flies, there is this suggestion, at least: one of them was
sacred to the name of Uatchit. What variety of fly is intended in the
text we cannot definitely say, as there are numerous species of flies.
But the _ichneumon_ fly is a symbol of this god, and their figures in
tiny statues and on papyri are well known to the modern archeologist.
They are a brilliant and beautiful insect, somewhat prized by the
entomologists of our day as specimens, but they can be a pest when they
come in too numerous companies!
Some years ago we were encamped in Mexico, with a company who were
digging for archeological treasure. The site was pleasant, the camp was
near a clear, meandering stream, and the shade trees were enjoyable.
There was just “one fly in the ointment” and that fly was the ichneumon.
Every time food was placed upon the camp table, this gorgeous insect
responded with enthusiasm and delight. They came in regiments and
companies, bringing all their relatives and friends with them! So we
could say from experience, that anyone who had to fight with a swarm of
ichneumon flies for his own share of the lunch, would soon come to
revile the god to whom this symbol was sacred! Not only Jehovah, but
_any_ god would seem preferable to Uatchit after an invasion of his
particular pets. Or should we turn this last word around and make it
pest, instead?
[Illustration: Hathor]
When we come to the Fifth Plague, we are again on solid and assured
territory. Once more firm archeological ground supports the theme of
this chapter. When God smote the cattle of Egypt, He dealt most
definitely and drastically with Egyptian polytheism. There were many of
the supreme objects of Egyptian worship that met their Waterloo in the
murrain on the cattle.
Chief of these is the mighty and venerated Hathor. She was the
“cow-goddess” that was universally worshipped in all the land, and was
to the human race of that day the “mother” principle of deity. Her most
common name in the Egyptian language is Het-Hert, which literally means
“the House of Horus.” The House of Horus is that portion of the sky
where Horus lives and is daily born, namely, the east. Hathor is
depicted in antiquity in many forms. Always she appears with a human
body, and may sometimes have a human head as well. But more often she
has a cow’s head on a human body, as the cow was her symbol. She often
walked the land in the theophany of a cow, and one could tell when a
calf was born, whether Hathor had come to earth, or not.
When this great goddess is pictured with a human head, she wears an
impressive headdress. This is composed of the spreading horns of a cow,
between which are seen the bonnet of Mut, the divine wife of Amon-Ra,
the king of the gods. Above this is seen the solar disk, as Hathor was
of “The Great Company” and was associated with all the beneficence of
the glorious and life-giving sun. The Book of the Dead teaches that
Hathor provides nourishment for the soul in the other-world, and as such
a provider she excels all the minor gods. So in all the forms in which
she is carved or drawn, she wears the sacred uraeus, to show her exalted
power.
When God smote the cattle, her especial symbol, He struck a mighty blow
at the tottering system for which Pharaoh had confidently expressed his
preference. The other forays were but skirmishes: this was a real and
decisive battle! This shrewd and telling victory was the beginning of
the end of the conflict. If the divine Hathor could not protect her
faithful following from the power of Jehovah, who could?
For not only Hathor was thus challenged and defeated, but other
important members of the Heavenly Company met defeat and disgrace in the
plague that smote the cattle. A common object in the Egypt of that day
was the sacred bull, Apis, whose power was vast indeed. His temples
dotted the land, and the priests of his cult were many and their power
was impressive in the extreme. On the forehead of Apis appears the
sacred triangle of eternity, and on his back is always seen the sacred
scarab, with spread wings.
Apis was the theophany of the god whose name was Ptah-Seker-Asar, and he
also was one of the triune resurrection gods. The living worshipped him
that they might live again in the world to come, and the dead, of
course, all worshipped him because he had made them to live again. Now,
alas, for those who trusted in him against Jehovah! He could not even
defend his own earth-form from the blight that his new enemy, Jehovah,
had sent on all that represented the great and powerful Ptah-Seker-Asar.
Thus God humbled the sacred Apis in the same stroke that crushed the
cult of Hathor.
To this record must also be added the name of Nut, the goddess of the
sky, and the wife of Geb. She it was who produced the egg out of which
the sun hatched, so in reality she preceded Horus and even Amon-Ra, even
though they ascended to a higher power and authority later. She is
depicted with a female human body, and the head of a cow. However, she
does not wear the solar disk, nor the headdress of Hathor, as she was a
little lower in the social company of the weird organization of nonsense
and mysticism that was the religion of Egypt.
The simple summary of the whole record is just this: all the gods of
Egypt were not able to defend the cattle, when the Lord God Jehovah
stretched out His hand to smite them! This the people of Egypt were
forced to concede, as their cattle died by the thousand before their
bewildered eyes, while not one of the herds of Israel lost so much as
one head of cattle by the murrain.
[Illustration: Reshpu]
The Sixth and Seventh Plagues are simple to deal with, as the record of
Egypt gives valuable aid to the unprejudiced student here. Imhotep was
the god of medicine, and the guardian of all the healing sciences.
Prayers were made to him for protection as well as for cures, and he was
greatly revered. In like manner, Reshpu and Qetesh were the gods of
storm and of battle, and they controlled all the natural elements except
the light. So the noisome and painful boils struck the devotees of
Imhotep and left him powerless to aid his praying following, and their
plight was pitiful indeed. How little it helped to see that the
followers of the god Jehovah, at whom Pharaoh had sneered with ridicule,
were comfortable, and with unblemished skins! No suppurating sores
advertised the pain of the Hebrews; the good hand of their God was upon
them, to protect them from the very disaster that came upon all the
Egyptians for Israel’s sake!
The medical man of the twentieth century, whose article we are now
considering, attributes all this painful consequence to the
bacteriological pollution of the Nile, which was accomplished by the
skill and wisdom of Moses. The present writer of this refutation is not
utterly ignorant of the science of bacteriology, but he humbly confesses
that he does not know of any pathogenic micro-organism that would bite
everybody except a Hebrew! We would like to know the name and the nature
of such a bacterium or bacillus! The Hebrews were exposed to the same
flies, the same germs, the same stench of the dead frogs, the same
epidemic that was consequent upon this chain of events, unless Moses
vaccinated or inoculated them all, some three and a half millions in
number. Truly the natural explanations of the supernatural cause reason
to totter on her throne!
[Illustration: Sebek]
But if God was at war with Imhotep, Reshpu and the gods of healing, and
desired to scatter their following and to open their eyes to the folly
of idol worship, we can see how He might protect His own, while smiting
the followers of the false religion. In that case also, Moses would not
need to be the only man in antiquity who could call up a devastating
hail storm at the dictate of his own will. Moses could leave it to God
to shame Reshpu and the other gods of the elements in the eyes of their
devotees.
The Eighth Plague, that of the locusts, is the easiest of all to
comprehend. This was a direct blow at the Egyptian conception of
Providence, and a sweeping victory over all that was holy in the eyes of
this idolatrous people. These ancient people ascribed the fertility of
their fields and the abundance of the harvests to certain specific
deities. The modern scholar establishes this fact by studying the hymns
of praise and the votive records of the Egyptians. But after the hail
had hammered their lovely ripening crops flat on the ground, and even
while they mourned their loss, swarms of locusts descended like a cloud,
and swept the land as clean of vegetation as a forest fire could have
done.
To see God’s purpose in this act, we need only consider the prophecy of
Joel. With a fidelity to detail that arouses the admiration of the
modern entomologist, this prophet of Israel portrays the devastation of
the land by a swarm of locusts, as a judgment from God upon His own
people. When famine and want stare men in the face, and they are beyond
the hope of other aid, then they turn back to God in sorrow and in
repentance. For where can men turn except to God, when the land lies
barren and devastated, and famine stalks the earth?
Thus in Egypt, when God would teach an unforgettable lesson to the proud
and haughty king whose impertinent comment had been, “Who is this
Jehovah?”, He punctuated His answer to Pharaoh’s question with a swarm
of locusts. It is reasonable to conclude that long after the starving
Egyptians had forgotten the pangs of hunger that came inevitably on the
heels of that visitation of consuming insects, the lesson of that
visitation remained.
All these disasters, following one after the other, had struck telling
blows at the very foundation of Egypt’s religion. But a worse was to
follow.
The Ninth Plague struck at the very apex and head of all the Great
Company of the pantheon. The most essential thing in all the physical
realm is light, and the Egyptians seemed to realize this fact. The
darkness of the ninth plague was a supernatural darkness. This much is
evident from the record, which says that it covered the land so grossly,
the people sought refuge in bed! Evidently artificial light would not
penetrate that fearful gloom; _but the children of Israel had light in
their dwellings!_
Of course they had it!
They are the people who later sang: “Jehovah is my light and my
salvation.”
But the songs of the Egyptians were directed to different gods entirely.
Here, then, was a golden opportunity to test the might of these
conflicting ideas of deity. Is Jehovah able to maintain His superiority
over the hosts of the Egyptian gods? They were indeed mighty in the
hearts of the people, and the contest was long and grim.
First of all to consider, there was the incomparable Thoth who had
worked out the system of placing all the stars, the sun and the moon in
the heavens. He had arranged also the seasons, as they had been decreed
by Ra. Although inferior to Ra and to Horus, nevertheless Thoth gave
light by night, and on those days that the sun was not visible. He also
gave Isis the power needed to raise the dead, and to offend him was to
suffer eternal loss. Remembering that the Hebrews had lived under this
culture and psychology for generations, and considering that they all
must have been tinctured somewhat with these beliefs, many of them must
have trembled indeed when Jehovah calmly engaged in battle with Thoth!
So the Lord God not only smote the god of Egypt in this part of the
conflict, but He also established His personal superiority in the minds
of His own despairing people. Certainly, when this plague ended, the
Hebrews hastened to follow His next commands without hesitancy, even
though those commands laid them in danger of the death penalty under
Egyptian law.
[Illustration: Sekhmet]
A lesser deity, but also a powerful one who suffered grievously in loss
of prestige while the darkness reigned, was the fire-goddess Sekhmet.
She was the divinity of fire, and thus also of artificial light. This
darkness that covered the land during this plague was called “thick”
darkness, and it was so impenetrable that for three days and nights, the
Egyptians stayed in bed! They saw the face of no man in those dark days
and dense nights, and it is evident that artificial light was useless.
Only in the houses of Israel did any light shine, but in each dwelling
in Goshen the light was undimmed. So it was demonstrated in the case of
Sekhmet, the lioness-headed goddess of artificial light, that she was
powerless when Jehovah invaded her realm.
With what delight did Moses remember all this, when later he wrote the
words of the First Chapter of Genesis. How his heart must have thrilled
as he spoke of God commanding the light to shine on the first day of
creation, and recorded the obedience of the light to the spoken word of
Israel’s God. He had seen that when God commanded darkness all the gods
of Egypt were powerless before Jehovah, and that it was therefore simple
for God to reverse the process, and bring light to alleviate the
darkness of the chaos.
The section of the pantheon that crumbled in the regard of the devoted
Egyptians that hour was a broad and numerous company. No divinity of all
the polytheistic company was very much more reverenced than Horus, the
hawk-headed. He was called “the eye of Ra,” and was the god of the
noontime sun. When the flaming heat of Ra was just overhead at the hour
of midday, and when its light and heat were the most intense, Horus was
in the ascendancy. When the deep darkness of the ninth plague hit the
land, the hearts of the people were sick with fright. Believing that the
sun was born anew every morning, and having an intense and
well-thought-out system of deities connected with this rite, they must
have thought that there had been wholesale slaughter and failure among
the heavenly beings. But there still would smoulder in their deepest
thinking, the dim hope that at noon the incomparable Horus would glow,
as Ra was the omnipotent, and his _eye_ could not be dimmed. But not
only did the noon pass in the same awful darkness, but two more noons
followed each other in slow succession, and the feebleness of the
once-revered Horus could no longer be doubted. So when they said, “Who
is mightier than Horus?” the children of Israel could reply with
grateful hearts, “Jehovah is; see, we have light in _our_ dwellings!”
But like many other heathen and idolatrous people, the chief object of
Egyptian worship was the sun itself. The natural mind can comprehend
this, and there is a little of the Parsee in most modern men. So to the
ancients the sun was a personification of beneficence and providence.
The worship of the sun took many forms in Egypt, but the oldest and most
general form of that worship was in the person of the god Ra, who
appears in ancient records in many guises, and under many names. Perhaps
the most common of these names is Amon-Ra. He was unquestionably the
chief form of deity to the Egypt of Moses’ generation.
[Illustration: Taueret]
As far as it can be said that the Egyptians conceived of a
god-principle, this was expressed in the person of Ra. He was the
creator of earth and of heaven, and of all things therein. All other
gods were parts of his person, and members of his body and substance.
The pantheon was headed by Ra, and after him came the gods and goddesses
who were parts of his body. One was his eye, another his ear, while
still another was his foot. This quaint conception was carried out for
every known section of the anatomy, which the Egyptians seemed to have
known fairly well.
Seeing, then, that Ra was immanent, pervasive, and the principle back of
all deities, he was the chief object of Jehovah’s enmity, and the real
subject of the contest and conflict. In all the other plagues the
_parts_ of Ra were defeated, and now at last the two ideas are locked in
the final struggle. It was preposterous to the Egyptians that any god or
power could be superior to Ra, as the sun is the source and seat of all
power. But the plague of darkness left him shorn of power and greatness,
and prostrated him before the feet of _Jehovah_ forever. Three
theophanies had Ra, and God desecrated every one of them!
Ra appeared in the form of the sun: so that was blotted out of the sky
for three days. Sometimes he walked the earth in the form of the
first-born of a cow, if that first-born was a bull. So the first-born of
all the cattle died, and Ra was covered with shame. Occasionally he was
supposed to visit men in the form of a ram. The first-born were all
sacred to him and dedicated to him from birth: yet when all the
first-born of Egypt died, the babes of Israel, with their cattle and
flocks were all safe, because they were under the shed blood of what was
Ra’s chief theophany, next to the sun! The application of the blood to
the lintel and the doorpost was an act of blasphemy against Ra, yet in
that very defiance the Hebrews were acknowledging at last that _Jehovah_
should be their God forever, in that He had proved His power.
[Illustration: Amon-Ra]
The Tenth Plague intrudes into the sphere of the ninth. The death of the
first-born was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, as far
as the Egyptian resistance to Jehovah was concerned. This is still aimed
primarily at Ra, although there were notable deities other than he that
suffered defeat in this last and awful skirmish. When the Children of
Israel left Egypt, bribed to depart by a people who were prostrated with
grief, the mourning Egyptians pressed upon them the cattle and the
flocks, the gold and the jewels requested. Anything to get rid of the
devotees of the awful Being who left every home in Egypt bowed in
sorrow, and who had slain, as well, every particle of faith the people
had in the once-powerful gods of the land of captivity!
To name many of these gods would be to weary the reader. But we cannot
refrain from naming Meskhemit, who was the goddess of birth. She was
also the companion of Hathor, and overshadowed the first-born of the
land. To what avail, when _all_ died who were under her divine
protection! And even stronger than she, was the mighty Min, the god of
virility and generation. Closely related to Amon-Ra, being the means of
extending the power of Ra to those who worshipped him, he too, fell with
a resounding crash, when the hand of The-Only-God-That-There-Is swept
all the idols of Egypt off their pedestals, in what might be called the
greatest “ten rounds” ever fought! Not only did _Jehovah_ win the battle
and the crown, He also won every round! The victory was complete and
crushing.
[Illustration: Set]
Many centuries later, Paul the Apostle recalled all that is implied and
stated here, when he wrote the ninth chapter of Romans and the
seventeenth verse. Here it is stated that God dealt so with Pharaoh,
that the name of God should be advertised throughout all the earth.
Is it so advertised?
Witness this article, cited above! Thirty-five hundred years have come
and gone since these things transpired, but the mind of man has not been
able to escape from the demonstration of God’s power that He gave in
that far-off day. And all we can say about this latest attempt to
explain the victory of God in the land of Egypt by attributing it all to
the smartness and genius of a learned man, is, it just will not stand
up! For the God who smashed the pantheon of Egypt evidently knew that
this attempt was due, and He raised from the dead, in an archeological
resurrection, the witnesses to the facts at issue. And we have done
nothing in this simple reply but review _their_ evidence! But in so
doing, we note again that modern science, whenever her voice may be
heard, establishes the Scripture and vindicates its claim, that “holy
men of old spake as they were moved by the spirit of God.”