“But as the frogs died, it would have meant that mosquitoes, flies and other insects
would have flourished without the predators to keep their numbers under control”.
Dr Stephan Pflugmacher
Benjamin Leon has written, in his article:
The 10 plagues of Egypt happened: Scientists - The Standard (newsday.co.zw)
The 10 plagues of Egypt happened: Scientists
….
The scientists believe this switch in the climate was the trigger for the first of the plagues.
The rising temperatures could have caused the river Nile to dry up, turning the fast-flowing river that was Egypt’s lifeline into a slow moving and muddy watercourse.
These conditions would have been perfect for the arrival of the first plague, which in the Bible is described as the Nile turning to blood.
Dr Stephan Pflugmacher, a biologist at the Leibniz Institute for Water Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin, believes this description could have been the result of a toxic fresh water algae.
He said the bacterium, known as Burgundy Blood algae or Oscillatoria rubescens, is known to have existed 3 000 years ago and still causes similar effects today.
He said: “It multiplies massively in slow-moving warm waters with high levels of nutrition. And as it dies, it stains the water red.”
The scientists also claim the arrival of this algae set in motion the events that led to the second, third and forth plagues — frogs, lice and flies.
Frogs development from tadpoles into fully formed adults is governed by hormones that can speed up their development in times of stress.
The arrival of the toxic algae would have triggered such a transformation and forced the frogs to leave the water where they lived.
But as the frogs died, it would have meant that mosquitoes, flies and other insects would have flourished without the predators to keep their numbers under control.
This, according to the scientists, could have led in turn to the fifth and sixth plagues — diseased livestock and boils.
Professor Werner Kloas, a biologist at the Leibniz Institute, said: “We know insects often carry diseases like malaria, so the next step in the chain reaction is the outbreak of epidemics, causing the human population to fall ill.”
Another major natural disaster more than 600km away is now also thought to be responsible for triggering the seventh, eighth and ninth plagues that brought hail, locusts and darkness to Egypt.
One of the biggest volcanic eruptions in human history occurred when Thera, a volcano that was part of the Mediterranean islands of Santorini, just north of Crete, exploded around 3 500 years ago, spewing billions of tonnes of volcanic ash into the atmosphere.
Nadine von Blohm, from the Institute for Atmospheric Physics in Germany, has been conducting experiments on how hailstorms form and believes that the volcanic ash could have clashed with thunderstorms above Egypt to produce dramatic hail storms.
Dr Siro Trevisanato, a Canadian biologist who has written a book about the plagues, said the locusts could also be explained by the volcanic fall out from the ash.
He said: “The ash fallout caused weather anomalies, which translates into higher precipitations, higher humidity. And that’s exactly what fosters the presence of the locusts.”
The volcanic ash could also have blocked out the sunlight, causing the stories of a plague of darkness.
Scientists have found pumice, stone made from cooled volcanic lava, during excavations of Egyptian ruins despite there not being any volcanoes in Egypt.
Analysis of the rock shows that it came from the Santorini volcano, providing physical evidence that the ash fallout from the eruption at Santorini reached Egyptian shores.
The cause of the final plague, the death of the first borns of Egypt, has been suggested as being caused by a fungus that may have poisoned the grain supplies, of which male first born would have had first pickings and so been first to fall victim.
But Dr Robert Miller, associate professor of the Hebrew scriptures, from the Catholic University of America, said: “I’m reluctant to come up with natural causes for all of the plagues.”
The problem with the naturalistic explanations, is that they lose the whole point.
“And the whole point was that you didn’t come out of Egypt by natural causes, you came out by the hand of God.”
[End of quotes]
Mackey’s comment: While I would once have shared Dr. Robert Miller’s view here, I now think that there is enough in the account of the Plagues of Egypt (Exodus 7-11) to warrant one’s giving all the glory and praise to God, even if one also posits the use of natural phenomena.
All the fine timing, for instance, was His.
And so was, a bit further on (Exodus 13:21-22), the Glory Cloud (popularly known as Shekinah), which served Israel as their guide along the way:
And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud (בְּעַמּוּד עָנָן) to lead them along the way, and by night in a pillar of fire (בְּעַמּוּד אֵשׁ) to give them light, that they might travel by day and by night. The pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night did not depart from before the people.
This was the same manifestation of glorious Light that the Shepherds and the Magi would later witness in relation to the Christ Child, who would appear on the radiant Cloud in 1925, at Pontevedra in Spain. See my article:
The Magi and the Star that Stopped
(4) The Magi and the Star that Stopped | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu
2:5-6 Plague is throughout the land. Blood is everywhere.
2:10 The river is blood.
Ipuwer Papyrus
https://ohr.edu/838/print
The Ten Plagues - Live From Egypt
by Rabbi Mordechai Becher
In the early 19th Century a papyrus, dating from the end of the Middle Kingdom, was found in Egypt.
It was taken to the Leiden Museum in Holland and interpreted by A.H. Gardiner in 1909. The complete papyrus can be found in the book Admonitions of an Egyptian from a heiratic papyrus in Leiden. The papyrus describes violent upheavals in Egypt, starvation, drought, escape of slaves (with the wealth of the Egyptians), and death throughout the land. The papyrus was written by an Egyptian named Ipuwer and appears to be an eyewitness account of the effects of the Exodus plagues from the perspective of an average Egyptian. Below are excerpts from the papyrus together with their parallels in the Book of Exodus.
(For a lengthier discussion of the papyrus and the historical background of the Exodus, see Jewish Action, Spring 1995, article by Brad Aaronson, entitled When Was the Exodus? )
IPUWER PAPYRUS - LEIDEN 344 TORAH - EXODUS
2:5-6 Plague is throughout the land. Blood is everywhere.
2:10 The river is blood.
2:10 Men shrink from tasting - human beings, and thirst after water
3:10-13 That is our water! That is our happiness! What shall we do in respect thereof? All is ruin. 7:20 …all the waters of the river were turned to blood.
7:21 ...there was blood thoughout all the land of Egypt …and the river stank.
7:24 And all the Egyptians dug around the river for water to drink; for they could not drink of the water of the river.
2:10 Forsooth, gates, columns and walls are consumed by fire.
10:3-6 Lower Egypt weeps... The entire palace is without its revenues. To it belong [by right] wheat and barley, geese and fish
6:3 Forsooth, grain has perished on every side.
5:12 Forsooth, that has perished which was yesterday seen. The land is left over to its weariness like the cutting of flax. 9:23-24 ...and the fire ran along the ground... there was hail, and fire mingled with the hail, very grievous.
9:25 ...and the hail smote every herb of the field, and broke every tree of the field.
9:31-32 ...and the flax and the barley was smitten; for the barley was in season, and flax was ripe.
But the wheat and the rye were not smitten; for they were not grown up.
10:15 ...there remained no green things in the trees, or in the herbs of the fields, through all the land of Egypt.
5:5 All animals, their hearts weep. Cattle moan...
9:2-3 Behold, cattle are left to stray, and there is none to gather them together. 9:3 ...the hand of the Lord is upon thy cattle which is in the field... and there shall be a very grievous sickness.
9:19 ...gather thy cattle, and all that thou hast in the field...
9:21 And he that did not fear the word of the Lord left his servants and cattle in the field.
9:11 The land is without light 10:22 And there was a thick darkness in all the land of Egypt.
4:3 (5:6) Forsooth, the children of princes are dashed against the walls.
6:12 Forsooth, the children of princes are cast out in the streets.
6:3 The prison is ruined.
2:13 He who places his brother in the ground is everywhere.
3:14 It is groaning throughout the land, mingled with lamentations 12:29 And it came to pass, that at midnight the Lord smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne to the firstborn of the captive that was in the prison.
12:30 ...there was not a house where there was not one dead.
12:30 ...there was a great cry in Egypt.
7:1 Behold, the fire has mounted up on high. Its burning goes forth against the enemies of the land. 13:21 ... by day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night.
3:2 Gold and lapis lazuli, silver and malachite, carnelian and bronze... are fastened on the neck of female slaves. 12:35-36 ...and they requested from the Egyptians, silver and gold articles and clothing. And God made the Egyptians favour them and they granted their request. [The Israelites] thus drained Egypt of its wealth.
Mackey’s continues: What gave pause to my earlier view (see above) was that the Plagues of Egypt were re-visited in modern times, with the Mount Saint Helens volcano (1980) - though the actual sequence of plagues may vary from the Exodus account - making me wonder if God had chosen to use the ancient Thera (Santorini) cataclysm as a backdrop to the biblical phenomena – as some commentators have suggested.
“The vastness of Santorini compared to the others – more than 80 cubic kilometres of island thrown into the sky one terrible night – is amazing”.
Gavin Menzies
The scholar who pioneered the fascinating notion of there being a material causal connection between the Plagues and Exodus of the Old Testament and the Thera (Santorini) cataclysm was Dr. Hans Goedicke, the Chairman of the Department of Near Eastern Studies at John Hopkins University, Baltimore.
Since then, other scholars and writers have taken up this suggestion, often using the more recent eruptions of Vesuvius and Krakatoa, but especially Mount St. Helens in Washington State, as a template of what might have occurred in the Theran – Old Testament case.
Dr. I. Velikovsky (Worlds in Collision, 1950) was one; Graham Phillips (Act of God), another, and (heavily indebted to Phillips), Gavin Menzies (Lost Empire of Atlantis). The latter, in the “New Evidence” section on pp. 3-32 at the back of his book, will summarise Velikovsky and a host of others, whilst giving his own interpretation.
In Part Three (p. 9), Menzies writes:
‘1444 BC – The year the earth faced extinction’
The Book of Exodus (1444 BC) compared with
the Santorini Volcanic Eruption: (Hebrew scholars
date the Exodus to 1444 BC – from Old Testament records)
I have had the good fortune to visit Vesuvius and Mount St Helens, to fly over the Indonesian Caldera, and to lie in bed looking down onto the Caldera of Santorini. The vastness of Santorini compared to the others – more than 80 cubic kilometres of island thrown into the sky one terrible night – is amazing.
[May be linked to Aegean island of Yali]
P. 9: … Aegean volcanic arc … Yali ….
P. 10: As the Thera foundation states: ‘The sampled profiles in Yali and Santorini consist of tephra layers with different radioactivity, possibly implying different eruptive phases, recorded on the neighbouring islands. The latter may indicate occasionally simultaneous eruptions of both Yali and Santorini volcanoes …’.
On p. 12, Menzies will reproduce some of G. Phillips’ comparisons between the plagues of Egypt and Mount St. Helens (Phillips also discusses this in his book, Acts of God, ch’s 9 “Cataclysm” and 10 “Exodus”).
Comparisons between the Nine Plagues of the
Old Testament Book of Exodus (1444 BC) and the
Mount St Helens Volcanic Eruption (AD 1980)
(thanks to Graham Phillips website:
www.grahamphillips.net).
showing parallels at Mount St. Helens with dead fish and blood red water:
- Flies
- Boils (skin sores and rashes)
- Hail (pellet-size volcanic debris, fiery pumice)
- Foul water (water supplies had to be cut off)
- Darkness (sun obscured for hours over 500 miles from volcano).
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