# Interesting take on the 10 plagues.....



## BlackCalvinist (Feb 13, 2005)

Saw this over on another site while looking for info on how to get rid of mold from a house....

http://mold-help.org/content/view/460/

Mold and The Ten Plagues

Bible Prophecy Ideology

The Learning Channel recently aired a program on the Ten Plagues (4/98) that discussed the theory that the plagues weren't ten separate events, but one long series of connected events.

The first thing the scholars determined was the time frame. They agreed on 1260 BC, about a thousand years after the pyramids were built. Supposedly around that time, the Egyptian life centered around Memphis, just south of present-day Cairo, and the Israelites were living 50-80 miles northeast of there.

The first plague turned the waters to blood, the fish died and the river stank. The show's contention is that this constituted a local outbreak of pfiesteria. This is the organism that killed many fish off the coast of North Carolina recently. The phenomena produces sores on the fish that leak blood and this, with the red pigment that occurs with some strains of the organism, would account for the first plague.

Once the fish had died and polluted the water, the next plague--frogs--appeared. Seeing all the fish were dead, there was nothing feeding on the spawn and huge groups of frogs would hatch and look to leave the stinking river. Toads of the specific genus Bufo are supposedly very common throughout the world and they have large clutches of eggs, so that the numbers can go up drastically within a short period of time if the conditions are right. Why the frogs died, however, was not discussed. Nevertheless, with all the frogs dead, the insect population would explode.

The next plague was of lice. The explanation for this plague was put off as exactly which insect was meant by the word "lice" was difficult to pin down. Seeing the classification of insects didn't come about until 1,000 years later, the experts believed that there were too many unanswered questions to make a definite choice.

They moved on to plague #4, the swarm of flies. They whittled the field down to 5 possibilities with just one fitting all the criteria--the stable fly. These types of flies bite and they lay up to 500 eggs at a time.

Next came the murrain on animals, an epidemic of sickness among livestock. Anthrax was discounted because no humans were infected. Hoof and mouth disease also was shot down because the tell-tale signs were not mentioned in the Bible narrative. To get this info they went to a USDA agency located on Plum Island off of the coast of CT where they were doing animal research for the Department of Agriculture. The expert there stated he thought this plague was caused by two different diseases--African horse sickness which strikes quickly and affects horses, mules and asses, and blue tongue, which is another closely related virus of the same family, which would attack the cattle, sheep and goats.

Once they had decided on what the murrain was, they discovered that those two viruses were transmitted by Culicoides, the midge or no-see-um and this gave them the missing plague of the lice. Elusive plague number three was identified as the midge which would attack humans and animals, but would also transmit a disease to the animals, but not to man.

On to plague #6, boils, blains or ulcers. They were looking for something that would affect both man and humans and found it in an obscure bacterial infection called "glanders" that could possibly be transmitted by the stable fly. Apparently this disease was described by ancient Greek and Roman historians and was even used as a biological warfare agent in WWI. This disease affects horses, camels, oxen, sheep, pigs and humans and causes lymph nodes to expand and oftentimes leads to death.

The Egyptians would have been having a very hard time of it by now (with the Israelites being spared these local occurrences because they were situated too far away to have been affected). The food supply was dwindling as the fish were dead, the cattle were dying and the Egyptian's last hope was about to be wiped out by the next plague--the hail. This is not uncommon in the area, but for the Egyptians it was very untimely.

The eighth plague, locusts, would finish off whatever the hail had not totally destroyed. And to add to their woes, the ninth plague, three days of darkness which the experts believe to have been a sandstorm, hits the area. The land is now covered with a layer of sand.

What crops the Egyptians had been able to harvest would have been hastily stored away in small pits under the desert sand, then the sandstorm would have created a "blanket" that bakes the stored crops and increases rotting. This rotting would have produced mold which in certain conditions can produce mycotoxins. Stachybotrys atra, a mycotoxin released by black mold in damp areas has been implicated in the deaths of many children recently in Cleveland. Many homes of the infected children showed evidence of this mold in the basement caused by water damage. If this toxin had been present in the grain that was left after the other nine plagues, it could account for the tenth plague--the death of the firstborn. Apparently this mycotoxin grows best on cellulose--grains and cereals--and can kill within hours.

According to the Bible, the eldest customarily receives a double portion. This may be the reason why the firstborn alone died--he was the only one who ingested enough of the mycotoxin for it to be lethal. This, however, does not account for why the firstborn of the animals died. The Jews at this time, Passover, would have been eating lamb, herbs and unleavened bread which the experts consider to be safe from contamination.

The show ended by saying: "For Jews, the ten plagues were directed by the hand of God, but we can begin to see now how that hand may have moved." It's an interesting hypothesis.
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Thoughts ?


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## Peter (Feb 13, 2005)

Great... If you want a purely naturalistic explanation for everything, I prefer to think of the plagues as super-natural

Have a blessed Lord's Day.


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## BlackCalvinist (Feb 13, 2005)

Ahhh.... but Who cause the pfisteria breakout in the first place ?


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## Peter (Feb 13, 2005)

You'd have to ask a scientist, I dont understand the complexities microbiology. 

Just said that to point out you can have an infinite regress of naturalistic causality or until you get back to big bang - and then your god is just an unmoved mover.

God providentially orders all things, but I tend to believe the special miracles of the bible are done w/o the instrumentality of organisms, sandstorms, etc. and they defy the ordinary pattern of the laws of nature. Next thing you know there'll be some program on T.V. that says Christ rose from the dead b/c a bolt of lightning defibrillated his heart.


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## VirginiaHuguenot (Feb 13, 2005)

We all need a little TLC at times, but for anti-supernatural unBiblical exegesis, I prefer the History Channel or the Washington Post.

It's all about the mold all right, molding people's minds.


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## LawrenceU (Feb 13, 2005)

There are gaps all in this theory. It acutally is quite old and based upon things that have been written since the mid 1800s at least. I remember reading these things in school. I can't cite it, but I recall it. The gaps are there is no interconnectedness between some of the plagues. ie. How would an insectal infestation cause a hail storm?


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## BlackCalvinist (Feb 13, 2005)

> _Originally posted by LawrenceU_
> There are gaps all in this theory. It acutally is quite old and based upon things that have been written since the mid 1800s at least. I remember reading these things in school. I can't cite it, but I recall it. The gaps are there is no interconnectedness between some of the plagues. ie. How would an insectal infestation cause a hail storm?



Exactly.  TLC sounds _good_....but not completely convincing.

I tend to believe the miracles just as they were written too.


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## turmeric (Feb 14, 2005)

But didn't Hosea call grasshoppers "God's army"? Couldn't pfisteria (sic) be a division in God's army also? This is just a list of secondary causes. I agree with what Pharoah's wizards said, "This is the finger of God".


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## BlackCalvinist (Feb 14, 2005)

'tend' to believe as written.

Of course, yes, the pfisteria could be another division of God's army. 

Either way, God is the primary cause of the plagues. 

The hail and the firstborn deaths are probably the ones most difficult to 'explain' naturalistically.


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## C. Matthew McMahon (Feb 14, 2005)

The plagues, if you follow through them, dealt with every major god the Egyptians worshipped. The idea behind the narrative, secondary to salvation issues, is the battle between Yahweh and the gods of Egypt. To give them a "scientific" explanation and leave it at that is somethingn that completely misses the point of the whole "battle."


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## LawrenceU (Feb 14, 2005)

Precisely, Matt!


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## BlackCalvinist (Feb 15, 2005)

> _Originally posted by webmaster_
> The plagues, if you follow through them, dealt with every major god the Egyptians worshipped. The idea behind the narrative, secondary to salvation issues, is the battle between Yahweh and the gods of Egypt. To give them a "scientific" explanation and leave it at that is somethingn that completely misses the point of the whole "battle."



Why couldn't it be both ?

God supernaturally dealt with each of the gods the Egyptians worshipped by setting off a series of events that dominoed off of each other (with the exception of the hail and death of the firstborn). The outcome was the superiority of Yahweh over other gods, the liberation of the Israelites and one of the greatest examples of God's sovereignty given in history to be demonstrated.


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## TimV (Feb 15, 2005)

It's interesting, and there can be some truth in the first several, but did a first born oxen or horse get a double portion? They why did they die like the humans? 

It would seem in part another subtile attempt to inject the idea of small problems here and there in the Bible.

I remember when they dug up the bone of a really big dude in Israel, and many Christian friends were running around like science had finally vindicated the Bible. The scientific article went on and on abou the similarity of these bones and Goliath, and then said while he might not have been QUITE as tall as in the Bible....and that his skull was attached (I guess my friends didn't rememeber what David did to him)...etc....

In a case like that, I frankly see more harm than good, almost like a patronising attitude towards the Bible, like "Boy, isn't it neat those guys who wrote the Bible were SO CLOSE to what really happened"

But thanks for posting it!


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## brymaes (Feb 15, 2005)

I've got no problem with the idea that God used second causes, but we have to be cautious with hypotheses like these which come from anti-supernatualistic presuppositions.


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