Passover, Plagues, and Coronavirus

Yet it's also true that a little while ago, when I spoke to doctor Laurie Santos of Yale University, she advised me that maintaining routine and tradition is a powerful way of managing ourselves under these circumstances. Well, for a lot of us, the maintenance of routine includes the schedule of holidays, and with Passover and Easter coming, we have to make a decision of whether to ignore those holidays altogether or to celebrate them as appropriately as we can

under our current straightened circumstances. Here a Deep Background. We don't celebrate holidays as a podcast, but we do try to maintain some sense of continuity, and so we thought it was appropriate to have an episode that did talk about Passover, but pass Over with a little bit of a Corona twist. And what better way to think about Passover and Corona than to talk about the biblical plague's associate with the Exodus story. For those of you who need a little bit of a refresher on what exactly

those plagues are. The traditional count starts with blood, frogs, lice and goes on in a list until it culminates with pale darkness and the killing of the firstborn. If that rings a bell for you, you might enjoy the rest of this episode. I'm joined by doctor i Don Dershowitz. He's a junior fellow at Harvard University's Society of Fellows. His academ mcwork has appeared in JBL, VT ZAW. Those are big journals in the Bible world. I promise you

not to mention The New York Times. His forthcoming book on the Redaction of the Herbival will be published by more Seabeck, and he's currently studying the composition history of the Book of Deuteronomy. Dan is one of the most creative scholars thinking about the Bible today, and he's also very engaging at talking about it. Dan, thank you for joining me. I wanted to start by asking you about

the biblical story of the plagues. Well, usually start by saying there are ten plagues, but you think that that might be a misnomer. Yeah, So the idea of ten plagues appears first in Rabbinic literature, and they count ten events that are described in the biblical text in the Book of Exodus. However, the decision to count those specific ten events is a matter of interprets and does not

at all derive directly from the text. But it's not even clear that the correct classification is plagues at all, as opposed to say miracles, signs, wonders, and so on. Well, then where would you start if you wanted to tell the story of the signs or wonders? Because I take it that signs and wonders are words that the biblical story uses repeatedly, rather than the word plague. So where would you start your list? And we now know they

don't have to be ten in your list? But where would you start with signs and wonders in the Accodus story? I think a good place to start would probably be the story of a competition between Aaron, brother of Moses, and the Egyptian magicians, where Aaron takes his staff and casts it upon the ground and it becomes a Tannin is the Hebrew word which may be a crocodile. Some people think that it's that it's a reference to a snake,

but it turns magically into a living creature. And then there's a bit of a battle between the magical creature created by Erin's staff and a magical creature created by the magicians. But that seems to be the beginning of a series of miracle competitions between Moses and Aaron and the Egyptians, And so that continues in the exactly the same form with the miracle of blood in the Nile and in other bodies of water, the miracle of what

we call the plague of frogs. All of those are told in exactly the same sort of language and literary

structure as that story of Aaron's Staff. You then talked about how the Egyptian magicians also perform others of these miracles, and there's a kind of face off, as it were, between Moses and Aaron and what they're doing, and then what the Egyptian experts are doing it their magicians are doing can I ask you seen in the light of sort of ancient Near Eastern practice or imagination or ideology, is there a reason to think that there would be

some fame associated with the idea of egypt magicians. That's a good question. I mean, they're definitely was a very robust tradition of magic in Egypt, and we also know that there were interactions between magicians from different cultures. So sometimes we find spells that are actually transliterated from in antiquity from one language to another. So we do know that Egypt had a robust tradition of magicians, and we do know that there was contact between those magicians and

magicians elsewhere in the ancient Near East. What you're describing, by the way it sounds to me, is like the practice of what I like to call ancient plagiarism, Right that if I had a good hymn or poem or story in my civilization, and you came for another civilization and you heard it, you would just copy that story or translate that story into your own civilization and maybe swap out some of the proper nouns of the gods or the kings or the heroes, and then boom, you'd

have a fresh story of your own. The most famous example of this of where stories make their way through different ancient civilizations is the flood story, which occurs not only in the Bible, but in older sources, ancient Ear Eastern Mesopotamian sources as well. Do you happen to know off the top of your head whether there are plague stories in other ancient Near Eastern traditions or is the Biblical story sort of a one off. You definitely do

have stories of plagues in the ancient Near East. In fact that there's also traditions of plagues having occurred in each We have ancient Egyptian texts describing things like epidemics. The Nile turning to red is something that's described in some ancient Egyptian texts. You're saying, there is an ancient Egyptian text that has the story where the Nile turns read Yes, I'm quite sure that there are Egyptian traditions

that are not entirely dissimilar. So when one hears that there are some ancient Egyptian sources that talk about the nile turning red, there are two ways to think about that. Roughly speaking, one way is the way that a religious traditionalist apologist would They would say, aha, you know, here we have some independent evidence that these events might have

actually happened. And then there's the way that a historian or a literary scholar would approach it, which is to say, well, this is a trope that existed in the ancient world, and if you've got a good story, people like to tell that story to each other. And it's not so surprising that story would have turned up in multiple different

literary traditions. I suppose that approach might also leave open room for the possibility that there was some natural phenomenon that sometimes occurred in Egypt that led to the reddening of water. But if there isn't any natural exclination for that, that's credible. I'm not aware of it, right, And there are various different phenomena that can lead to the reddening of waters, you know, from algae to declayed deposits and

all sorts of things like that. But clearly what's described in part of the biblical account where it says that it was accompanied by the water became undrinkable and all the fish died. I mean, that's a sort of very dramatic occurrence that doesn't necessarily align with the presence of algae. But but back to your your previous question about ancient Near Eastern texts talking about plagues. I mean, we have

that even in the Bible. Moreover, you know, a really interesting text in that regard, I would say, is in Deuteronomy twenty eight, where we have a whole series of curses, and those curses include reference to an Egyptian disease of some sort, says meet sign, so may the Lord strike you with the Egyptian boils or something like that. And that's in fact one of the plagues described an exodus, so that it's not only a mention in the Bible of a of a plague of some story, but it's

even associating this particular one with Egypt. And I don't think that it needs to be a reference specifically to the plagues as told in the narrative. It could just be a disease that's associated with Egypt. You know, some people call the coronavirus virus. I'm gonna say it's the Chinese virus of its era, the Egyptian boils. Yeah, we'll be back in just a moment. Let's turn to some more of the concrete plagues now and see if we can come up with anything interesting about them. So the frogs,

I've always been fascinated by the frogs. Essentially, all of the other plagues or miracles sound to me sort of vaguely plausible. You know, large number of locusts eating everything, that happens sometimes in the world. You know, pestilence, animals dying, that happens, boils definitely disgusting, and that happens even the darkness, which maybe doesn't exactly happen in the way that it's depicted in the Biblical text. There are eclipses, and you

can imagine people extending from that. But the inundation of an entire country by frogs has always seen to be a little weird and outlying. Do you have any insight into that? What's but the frogs? Yeah, I mean, I agree with you that frogs taking over a whole country sounds relatively implausible, even as a once in a millennium sort of event. I'm not an expert on ecology or on the habitat of frogs, but my understanding is that they're amphibians and don't like to be very far from

the water. At all. So, assuming that all of Egypt didn't become marshland, I'm not sure frogs could have survived in the city centers. All right, Well, we'll have to leave then as a mystery for the moment. What about the plague that in the Hebrew is called arov and which usually gets translated in most English translations as a mixture of wild animals or something to that effect. The

word literally means a mixture. If you think of the children's picture books of the plagues, you sort of imagine lions and tigers and other things walking around, which notably are never mentioned in the biblical text. What is this confusing plague probably meant to have been in the original context. Yeah, so, I mean it's worth pointing out with the question of

what it means literally. So as you say, the root iron leigh bet of this word is something that sometimes has connotations of mixture, although that same root other times

has different connotations. It's the root of the word west, and relatedly the root associated with evening, and so it has various different meanings that root, And in the case of this particular plague, some of the ancient translations suggests that this was some sort of insect flying, perhaps not entirely dissimilar from the plague of what we call lice

or keynan in Hebrew. Eton let's fast forward to, as it were, the granddaddy of them all, the plague of the Death of the Firstborn, which is maybe the most maybe I don't know if it's the most Corona appropriate, but it's certainly the one that involves the warning that people not leave their homes until the day, and so there's a there's a little bit of self isolation going on at the family level. And it's also the one of the plagues, it's most embedded in the story of

actually the children of Visible getting up and leaving. Why do you think the firstborn are so much in play here? Why not just you know, a plague that kills off all of your offspring, or maybe it's about Pharaoh being the king. Any thoughts on the firstborn aspect. Yeah, that's a really good question. I think that there's you know, something even more impressive about killing just the firstborn then say killing everyone. And if you're going to kill anyone,

then killing the firstborn is really devastating. It really is appropriate as a climactic plague in terms of the impact. I think that it's it at least feels when when I read it, like in a particularly traumatic event. Part of that might be totally literary, and that it's it's a more expensive description than what we have, say for

for frogs or life. But there is something about both afflicting everyone and like proving the power, proving that this isn't just you know, a pandemic, but something that can only be the hand of God. In the fact that it's just the firstborns who are afflicted, that really shows who's in charge. A don I wonder if I could close by asking you a more personal question, and it's this.

You know, you maintain a traditional Jewish practice. You know, you go to the synagogue, you perform the rituals, you keep the Sabbath, and you're also brilliant and path breaking Bible scholar who engages with the Biblical narratives as historical artifacts. When you think about Passover, do you draw a line.

Do you think, well, if the Passover state or I'll talk like a traditionalist, or do you think no, like this is how I tell the story of the pastor you know, the rabbi say, whoever says more about the telling of the Passover story deserves praise is a your review for yourself at least that telling more about the Passover story includes the kind of historical analysis that we were just doing. For me personally, it does. These are

the things that I enjoy. I delight in reading the texts critically, in thinking about the historical contexts, and you know, the actual historical events that may or may not be reflected in these texts and traditions. So I grew up like my parents and grandparents doing the Passover Sater every year, and it's extremely important to me and part of my heritage.

But I do like to ask questions, and that, you know that, famously is one of the points of the Passover Sater is to have you know, the children ask questions. And I haven't grown out of that, and and so every year I do like to think about the problems and the complications and the evolution of the different traditions and the multiplicity of traditions. In fact, you know, a wonderful thing is that you know, one of the elements, one of the central elements of the Passover Sater is

you know, this sort of codified question asking. And so to me, these you know there are layers upon layers of questions. You know, the Passover Stater is designed to inspire questions, and even the questions that are being asked have questions that can be asked about them, and that's my favorite part of the Passoversader. Well, I appreciate it, Don that you're giving us a version of the Passover Sader where it is the origin of your engagement with

the Biblical criticism. So I appreciate that very much. I'm very grateful to Dan for joining me for our special Passover episode. I know you're working on some very big things, and with any luck, when those are published, we'll have you back to report on those other projects too. Thank you very much for joining me. Thank you. Talking to Dan made me feel ready to try, in a limited sort of way, to re engage some of that tradition and some of that ritual in the form of a

Passover Sader. I hope it had that effect for you, whether you're celebrating Passover, Easter or none of the above. Until the next time I talk to you, be careful, be safe, be well, and enjoy whatever holidays work for you. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia gene Coott, with research help from zooe Wynn. Mastering is by Jason Gambrell and Martin Gonzalez. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis Guerra.

Special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg, and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. I also write a regular column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at bloomberg dot com Slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com slash Podcasts. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. This is deep ban