By Daniel Abraham and Shmuli Phillips
In just a few nights time, the readership of this group will find themselves sitting around their respective Seder tables, gently dabbing ten drops of wine from the glass in front of them to commemorate the ten plagues which God inflicted upon the ill-fated Egyptians. The notion of the plagues as a set of ten features prominently in the traditional liturgy and festive songs recited by celebrants throughout the generations. Those approaching from a scholarly perspective, however, are confronted by a competing claim: that the account of Exodus 7-12 is in fact a combination of several original versions of the plagues which emanated from different sources (known as “E”, “J” and “P”). Such claims sometimes also draw upon references to the plagues in the book of Psalms (78, 105) which present only some of the plagues and do so in a different order.
The main thrust of these critical claims is that each original source contained only a smaller number of plagues, and that they were later fused into a single narrative by some unknown redactor who produced the Torah as we have it today. This post will attempt to demonstrate that a close examination of the text shows these claims to be unfounded.
Though source critics themselves dispute as to how the text should be divided, we will focus primarily on the version advanced by Richard Elliot Friedman (The Bible with Sources Revealed, 2005), which assigns half of the plague of Blood to “E” and half to “P”. Frogs are also half “E” and half “P”. Lice and Boils are “P”. Wild beasts (or flies), Pestilence, Boils, Hail, and Locusts are “E”. Friedman’s primary support for this division is linguistic – for example the various usages of terms such as “kaved” and “chazak” – while a narrative mentioning Aaron performing the plague is assumed to relate to the “P” (or Priestly) source.
In opposition to such attempts to divide the Torah’s account of the plagues in Egypt, other scholars have presented powerful evidence from the text to support the literary unity of the plagues narrative. The analysis by these scholars reveals several underlying patterns and parallels that run through the entire passage. If the narrative of the plagues had been cobbled together from disparate original sources, as Friedman claims, it is scarcely believable that they would produce such clear and consistent patterns in their combined form.
Placing the plagues into groups of three, we see plagues 1-3 are performed by Aaron and implemented by means of a staff. Moses performs plagues 4-6 with no mention of either hands or staff. Plagues 7-9 are also initiated by Moses, this time through the agency of his hands. These three groups of plagues share other sets of features. Plagues 1-3 involve the water and the lower regions, plagues 4-6 affect higher life forms (humans, cattle, then both humans and cattle). Plagues 7-9 invoke the sky.
This is by no means the only manner in which the Torah groups plagues in threes. In plagues 1, 4, and 7, Pharaoh receives a prior warning on his morning visit to the Nile. In plagues 2, 5, and 8 Moses is commanded “Go to Pharaoh” and delivers only a general warning. For plagues 3, 6, and 9 no warning is given at all.
Beneath the level of triplets, another pattern emerges this time based on pairs. Plagues 1 and 2 involve the Nile, 3 and 4 feature insects, 5 and 6 inflict disease, 7 and 8 arrive from the sky, while 9 and 10 deal with darkness – the 10th plague actually arrives at midnight.
These elegant, complex patterns within the plagues indicate that the entire passage was composed by a single author, who paid careful attention to detail and to the gradual development of the nature and impact of the plagues. For those who instead attribute the ten-plague narrative to a hastily arranged work of disparate sources which was somehow synthesized serendipitously, these patterns represent a set of uncomfortable yet undeniable coincidences.
A further blow to source critics’ suggestion that divisions of the text reflect distinct original sources is their inability to agree on some of the most basic, foundational aspects of these alleged sources. To highlight some of the key examples, Friedman criticizes his colleague Joel Baden, writing:
“On the positive side, Baden defends the existence of the E source against those who have denied it. On the negative side, Baden reverses much of the source identification of J and E in the section treated here and in the entire plagues text that follows. The evidence of language collected in The Hidden Book in the Bible is contrary to Baden’s re-identification of E texts as J, but Baden does not cite or deal with this evidence. The E texts that he calls J are entirely lacking all fifty of the terms that are characteristic of the J source and its related texts."
[The Exodus, 2017]
Meanwhile, David Carr, who also advocates for dividing the plagues up according to multiple authorship, attacks the above approaches of Friedman and Baden arguing that:
“By the end of the 1990s, few specialists in Pentateuchal studies continued to affirm the existence of a separate, identifiable, “Elohist” document.” He adds, “in his The Hidden Book in the Bible…pp.353-58, Friedman presents a brief summary of the traditional case for dividing J and E without an engagement of the critiques of that hypothesis, particularly in Europe.”
[The Formation of the Hebrew Bible: A New Reconstruction, 2011]
A completely different theory was proposed by the biblical scholar S. R. Driver, who understood the plagues as having originated from three distinct sources: J, P and E.
As biblical scholar Gary Rendsburg aptly summises:
“if the source critics themselves cannot agree in the main, then perhaps an entirely new approach is worthy of consideration…To my mind, a far simpler and less complicated approach is to discard the entire source-critical method and to assume an intentional ordering of the plagues in the manner described above…Once more, it is better to posit a single, unified authorial voce than to reconstruct hypothetical source that in truth are only the constructs of scholars, unattested in the actual record.”[How the Bible is Written, 2019]
Kenneth Kitchen concludes similarly:
“The account of the plagues in Exod. 7-12 is a well-formulated unity; and (as some traditional critics already admit) it cannot meaningfully be split up between imaginary sources such J, E, P (for which no physical MSS actually exist!), without making a nonsense of the account of the plagues that only works as a unity…This kind of formulation is created ab initio, from the start—not by fiddling with fragments as with a jigsaw puzzle.".”
[On the Reliability of the Old Testament, 2006]
We conclude by addressing another argument advanced by those who challenge the cohesiveness of the Torah’s account of the plagues, this time on the basis of external rather than internal evidence. Two chapters of Psalms (78 and 105) provide descriptions of the divine punishments inflicted upon Egypt, but neither enumerate all of the plagues described in Exodus – and those which are recorded are presented in a different order. This omission and ordering is viewed by some scholars (cited in Kugel, How to Read the Bible) as being indicative of contradictory traditions and sources. Psalm 78 orders the plagues as 1,4, 2, 8, 7, 5, 10 (omitting 3, 6, and 9) while Psalm 105 lists them as 9,1,2,4, 3, 7, 8, 10 (omitting 5, and 6).
While the agenda of these chapters of Psalms certainly warrants a proper explanation, the very suggestion that a work of poetic praise can pose a challenge to the descriptive prose of Exodus is tenuous from the outset. As Kitchen explains:
“This illustrates a basic literary phenomenon endemic to the ancient Near East, yet one constantly abused by biblicists. When prose and poetry accounts coexist, it is prose that is the primary source and poetry that is the secondary celebration.”
In the case of Psalm 105, the author’s stated agenda, which is repeated throughout the introductory section of the chapter, is to proclaim and publicise the mighty wonders of God. In this context one can understand why he opens his list of plagues with what appear to be the most stunning miracles – sudden darkness and water turning to blood – before concluding with the more superficially nature-driven events such as hailstorms, locusts and death of the firstborns. Pestilence and boils, which do not feature in Psalm 105, are the two least conspicuous and arguably least severe miracles (they are the only two that Pharaoh does not beg Moses to remove).
Regarding Psalms 78, the American professor of Hebrew studies Robert Alter is not convinced by the source-critics’ claims writing:
"There are only seven plagues mentioned in the psalm, and they are not entirely in the same order as the ones reported in Exodus, though, as in Exodus, turning the Nile into blood is at the beginning and the killing of the firstborn is at the end. The scholarly inference that these lines reflect a different "tradition" from the one registered in Exodus is by no means necessary. That is, a poetic recapitulation of the familiar Plague narrative from Exodus would not have been obliged to repeat all the material from Exodus, or to follow the identical order."[The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, 2018]
Much like the ten spilled wine drops on the Pesach Seder plate, the ten plagues may contain certain unique properties that may be taken to indicate independent existence. Yet one who observes them in their full context recognizes that they unmistakably originate from a single author.
First posted to Facebook 2 April 2021, here.
