By the 11th century, author Steven Weitzman reveals, a Passover custom had emerged among Ashkenazi Jews: spilling drops of wine as each of the 10 Plagues is named. Over time, this ritual became one of the most dramatic moments of the Passover Seder. An evocation of God’s wrathful, destructive, and protective power, it was also repurposed by some Jewish households in the 20th century as an acknowledgment of the suffering of Egyptians.
In his book Disasters of Biblical Proportions: The Ten Plagues Then, Now, and at the End of the World, Weitzman (a professor of Hebrew and Semitic languages and literature at the University of Pennsylvania and author, among other books, of The Origin of the Jews: The Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age) provides a history of how Jews, Christians, and Muslims have interpreted and reimagined the “rather sparse” account of each of the 10 plagues in the Book of Exodus to reflect their own “personalities, beliefs, emotions, self-interest, and hopes for the future.” Retelling the Bible “anachronistically,” Weitzman reminds us, is a “mode of creativity,” worthwhile in its own right but also for its role in keeping the Bible alive in people’s imaginations for more than 2,000 years.
In each of the 10 chapters in his book, Weitzman examines a distinctive or puzzling feature of one of the plagues. After noting, for example, that Exodus did not intend frogs to be funny, he speculates that rabbis subsequently incorporated the comic, deflationary role they played in Greek comedy into midrashic accounts of the second plague. More recently, in response perhaps to the popularity of the Easter Bunny and the Muppet Kermit the Frog, Passover frog songs in the United States directed at children added a sense of playfulness, chaos, and incongruity to Seders without displacing memories of persecution and martyrdom.
As early as the 17th century, retellings of the fifth plague, pestilence, asserted that cattle were sentient beings, whose deaths should be lamented, and God made animals suffer only because it was necessary to save the lives of oppressed people. In 1988, Haggadah for the Liberated Lamb maintained that Moses’ efforts to save a lamb from dying of thirst convinced God to choose the shepherd to lead the Israelites out of slavery.
Muslim representations of locusts, the eighth plague, Weitzman reveals, struggled to accommodate the contradictory roles they played: sources of nourishment, ravenous pillagers, and soldiers in God’s army, used to punish sin and induce repentance. In the 20th century, some Muslims had “apocalyptic anxiety” that poisoning locusts with pesticides might portend the end of the world.
Disasters of Biblical Proportions also addresses historical, philosophical, and theological influences on revised understandings of the plagues.
The original account of the first plague, Weitzman indicates, implied that God created a drought by turning the rivers in Egypt into blood to force Pharaoh to release the Israelites. Later accounts, however, explained it as revenge for the drowning of newborn Jewish babies in the Nile and preventing Jewish women from washing away menstrual blood in ritual baths. Some Haggadahs claimed that Pharaoh ordered the murder of hundreds of Jewish children so that he could bathe in their blood to cure his leprosy.
THE FIRST plague took on added significance in medieval Europe following accusations that Jews killed Christian children to mix their blood in the wine and matzah they consumed during Passover. Midrashic accounts may also have been intended as critiques or parodies of the forced baptism of Jewish babies.
After each of the first five plagues, Exodus indicates, Pharaoh hardened his heart and refused to let the Israelites go. But after the sixth plague, boils, which was even more destructive than its predecessors, he seemed to lose his will to resist. Surprisingly, God intervened and compelled him to continue resisting Moses
Free will, mercy and justice
“This twist,” Weitzman writes, stimulated attempts to understand the scope of human agency in a world ruled by an all-powerful deity. Treatises by the apostle Paul, Origen of Alexandria, Pelagius, Erasmus, Martin Luther, and John Calvin became flashpoints in intra-Christian debates about free will, divine control, mercy, and justice.
Moses Maimonides, the most prominent Jewish thinker in the 12th century, was a “theological compatibilist,” who believed free will was “a pillar of the Torah” and that God did not suspend causation or the laws of nature when he hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Despite warnings from Moses and Aaron, Maimonides emphasized, Pharaoh repeatedly chose to sin. By the sixth plague, he had become habituated to exercising his freedom in evil ways. The phrase “The Lord hardened his heart” marked that moment.
Christians and Jews, Weitzman emphasizes, interpreted the 10th plague, the slaying of firstborn Egyptians sons, in different ways. For Jews, God used the plague to “redeem” the Israelites but allowed them to pay him back by killing their firstborn animals.
Christians, who believed that Jesus offered his life on behalf of humanity, claimed the plague anticipated the Crucifixion. “Just as the blood of the Passover offering saved those in Egypt,” 2nd-century philosopher Justin Martyr declared, “so also, the blood of Christ will deliver from death those who have believed.”
Disasters of Biblical Proportions concludes with a reminder that the COVID-19 pandemic broke down “the boundary between the biblical story and the present.” Some Catholics attached a red ribbon to their doors to protect them against the disease. “We will be sitting at the Passover Seder with a plague outside the door,” Rabbi David Wolkenfeld declared. “We will be divided in our homes with the blood on the lintel posts, just sitting in fear and not knowing when to go forth.”
Author Abigail Pogrebin confessed to what must have been a widely shared sensation: “For me, it has been hard to fathom this idea of plagues. It was so distant, so antiquated. I am not sure I ever believed it. But now I believe the unimaginable thing, the thing you can’t stop, the thing you can’t control. I just don’t think you can read this part of the Seder the same way anymore.” ■
The writer is The Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
DISASTERS OF BIBLICAL PROPORTIONS
THE TEN PLAGUES THEN, NOW, AND AT THE END OF THE WORLD
By Steven Weitzman
Princeton University Press
328 pages; $30