Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [50]
Boils. (Aaron and Moses throw soot into the air, which turns to a dust that produces festering boils on the skin of the Egyptians and their animals—which were presumably killed by the fifth plague.)
The heaviest hail ever seen falls on Egypt but again doesn’t touch Goshen.
Locusts. (A common pestilence in the ancient Near East.)
Darkness blots out the sun for three days. (The khamsin, a hot wind from the Sahara, produces thick dust clouds that block the sun, usually in March through May.)
The death of Egypt’s firstborn, both human and animal.
God tells Moses to have the Hebrews daub their doorposts with lamb or goat’s blood. In this way they will be protected when the angel of death “passes over” the land and kills the firstborn of Egypt. The final plague is commemorated in the Jewish festival of Passover. Most scholars believe that the Passover was actually a combination of two ancient festivals—an agricultural festival celebrating the barley harvest and a pastoral ritual in which an animal was sacrificed to ward off evil—later reinterpreted as a memorial of the deliverance from Egypt. Exodus reads, “This day shall be unto you for a memorial; and ye shall keep it a feast to the Lord throughout your generations.” (Ex. 12:14)
In commenting on the plagues in The Bible and the Ancient Near East, Cyrus H. Gordon and Gary Rendsburg note that each of the plagues is aimed at specific gods in the Egyptian pantheon, ending with the sun god Ra, who is overpowered by darkness. Yahweh was not only demonstrating his power over men and nature but proved that this God is greater than any other gods.
With the death of the firstborn of Egypt—from wealthiest to poorest, human and animals—Pharaoh relents and tells Moses to “rise up and go away from my people.”
Did the Hebrews build the pyramids?
There are no pyramids in the Bible. Despite the fact that these structures would have certainly been the talk of the ancient world, the authors of the Bible didn’t consider them worthy of note. (There are no cats in the Bible either, an interesting curiosity only because the cat was one of the most significant animal figures in Egyptian religion.) The missing pyramids are a strange oversight, but understandable; they played no part in the unfolding of the biblical narrative. However, the Bible also fails to record the names of the Pharaohs of Egypt, who held such great importance to the people of Israel, while it is filled with the names of many other ancient kings, some of them quite obscure from a modern perspective.
The first pyramids began to rise around 2900 BCE. The pinnacle of pyramid construction, the Great Pyramid of Khufu, and the extraordinary Great Sphinx built by his son Khafre, date from c. 2550 to 2500 BCE. Accepting a possible early date for Joseph in Egypt at around 1700 BCE, the pyramids would have existed well over a thousand years before any Hebrews arrived in Egypt. Maybe that meant they weren’t such big news anymore. Maybe the Hebrews up in the Nile Delta never got to see the pyramids, like tourists who come to New York but never see the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia or the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Or maybe the writers of the Bible didn’t want to point out any of the accomplishments of their chief oppressor.
Contrary to the long-held notion, begun by the Greek Herodotus, “Father of History,” that hundreds of thousands of slaves built the pyramids, recent research has shown that the pyramids were probably constructed by smaller work crews who were not slaves but conscripts or volunteers from farm villages. They were supported by thousands of bakers, brewers, cooks, and other “service people.” The product of a highly developed and motivated society, the pyramids show an extraordinary degree of social organization. The laborers were paid in food and clothing, and