The Ten Plagues, the first nine of which more or less we are going to explore here, raise huge issues about Yahveh's love and kindness. People often wonder how a being who proclaims himself to be a god of love can rain down such wanton destruction on people. And, to be fair, this is a legitimate question.
After Moses and Aaron are rebuffed by Pharaoh the second time, Yahveh tells them that the kid gloves are coming off. He's given Thutmose III two chances to let the Israelites go with no adverse consequences and both times Pharaoh has refused. Yahveh through Moses had warned Pharaoh that if he continued to refuse, the consequences would not be pleasant and so the plagues began.
The first plague begins in the latter half of Exodus 7 with the turning essentially all the water in Egypt into blood, which made a huge mess. The fish died and stunk to high heaven and people had a hard time finding drinking water although they managed to get by through digging wells. But Pharaoh largely laughed it off.
A week later, Yahveh unleashed his second salvo: frogs. Yes, you read that correctly, Yahveh sent a plague of frogs. Frogs came up from the water and were literally everywhere. They were in beds, on people, in ovens, in bread, and just about anywhere else. You could barely walk without stepping on a frog, which in addition to being disgusting was also sacrilegious as frogs were sacred to the ancient Egyptians.
It was annoying enough that for a moment, Thutmose pretended to let the Israelites go just to get rid of the frogs, which Yahveh through Moses did. Of course their version was to have all the frogs die simultaneously which made a massive and revolting mess. And Pharaoh changed his mind.
The next judgment Yahveh dropped on Egypt was to infest the land with gnats, lots and lots of tiny little gnats. They were everywhere, getting the hair, eyes, ears, food, clothes, and other such places of all the people. But there was one little change this time. Up to this point, Pharaoh's magicians had been able to reproduce the stunts Moses and Aaron pulled: the snakes, the blood, and the frogs. But they couldn't reproduce the gnats, which freaked them out. A lot. But Thutmose just shrugged them off.
So Yahveh upgraded from gnats to flies. The land was covered with flies. Now whether these were horseflies or other biting flies, I don't know. Whatever they were, they certainly ate the food and drove everyone crazy as you can imagine that flies do. But again, there was a difference with this plague verse the previous three: the land of Goshen, where the Israelites lived, was not touched. At any rate, the flies were enough that again Pharaoh pretended to capitulate only to change his mind yet again when the plague was gone.
Up to now, Yahveh had still been playing nice. The first four plagues, while exceptionally irritating, had not been life threatening. But with Pharaoh's stubborn refusal and occasional deception, that was about to change.
Plague five sent a clear message that Yahveh was not to be taken lightly. After warning Pharaoh, who as usual ignored the warning, Yahveh struck down every single animal possessed by the Egyptians. Horses, cows, sheep, goats, pigs: whatever it was, if it was owned by an Egyptian, it died. Again, the Israelites' animals were spared.
You can imagine the economic blow this leveled against the Egyptian nation. Thousands of people depended on their animals for their income and now they were suddenly gone. These animals provided food, clothing, tools, and other such things. But this was only the beginning and Pharaoh stubbornly refused to bend to Yahveh's will.
The next plague was worse. Now Yahveh directly attacked the people, causing painful boils to break out over all the people. It was so bad that the magicians couldn't even stand in front of Moses and Aaron. And still Pharaoh refused to yield.
Yahveh upped the ante. He sent the worst hailstorm that Egypt had ever seen, flattening anything growing that was more than ankle height. Trees, crops, more than a few buildings, livestock (that the Egyptians had purchased from the Israelites), and anyone stupid enough to be outside were all destroyed. Now was not only Egyptians husbandry wiped out, but so was the vast majority of their agriculture. Legitimate questions about how they were going to eat in the coming year were starting to be asked. And yet Pharaoh resisted.
So Yahveh sent his economic coup d'grace. A massive swarm of locust swept down and ate anything that had survived the hailstorm, reducing the land of the Nile to a barren landscape like the rest of North Africa. The people of Egypt now faced starvation because their Pharaoh stubbornly rebelled against Yahveh's command.
The ninth plague itself seems rather innocuous. Yahveh plunged the land of Egypt into total, oppressive darkness, which was a direct attack on Amun-Re, the son god and father of Pharaoh (according to Egyptian mythology). Yahveh had stripped the Egyptians of everything but their lives and this darkness was ominous, like the calm before the storm.
Again Pharaoh tried to haggle with Yahveh only to be told that it was all or nothing. In a rage, he threw Moses and Aaron out of the palace, telling them that if he saw them again, he would kill them. In that act of defiance, Pharaoh sealed his nation's fate.
The tenth and final plague, which will be dealt with in more depth in the following post, was far and away the harshest. In it, Yahveh promised that at midnight, he would execute the firstborn of every living thing in Egypt from Pharaoh's son to the firstborn of all the cattle. And at midnight, Yahveh carried through with his promise and Pharaoh's will finally broke.
We read this and it horrifies us. How could a god of love do this? It seems so incongruent with the message and character of Christ in the New Testament that it is made many theologians act like there is a different god of each testament. Others have disregarded the Old Testament entirely because of stuff like this.
But is it really? Or was what Yahveh did justice?
A couple of weeks ago, I went on a school trip to Berlin, Germany. While we were there, we made a stop at a place called Sachsenhausen. Sachsenhausen was a concentration camp just outside of Berlin that became the mother of all Nazi camps throughout Europe during World War II. Hundreds of thousands of people were imprisoned there, mostly Jews but others too, and thousands of those were murdered through medical experiments, starvation, executions, or mass gassings. It is a chilling place to be sure.
If any of you have ever been to one of the Nazi death camps (not something I necessarily recommend) perhaps you can better understand Yahveh's punishment of Egypt. We walk through these places, reading the stories and seeing the morgues and mass graves and we get angry. We want something to be done to the people responsible for these atrocities because we know in our bones that this isn't right; that this isn't human.
And then were read of the doctors who orchestrated the horrific medical experiments on prisoners or the camp commandants who got sadistic pleasure out of torturing innocent people to death that they were tried and then hung in 1948. We read that and we get a measure of peace. It doesn't bring back those who died, but it does at least say that the people responsible don't get away with what they did. They don't get to enjoy long, happy lives after so ruthlessly taking them from others. And that gives us a sense of balance and order to the world. It doesn't make things right, but it does put things in the right direction.
Remember back to Exodus chapter 1, the introduction to all of this? Out of fear, the Egyptians had enslaved the Israelites with the intention of working them to death. It was to be a long, slow genocide of slavery. Except that when that wasn't fast enough, they employed more draconian measures, massacring the baby boys of all the Israelites, first trying through the midwives and then sending soldiers to toss them into the Nile. Moses survived yes, but how many infant Hebrews met their demise at the jaws of crocodiles? Hundreds? Thousands?
And this wasn't just something that the Pharaohs did. The people were whole hearted participants. They had hated these Semites just as much as the Pharaohs and they went along with the massacre too. They had made their bed and now Yahveh was going to make them sleep in it.
Throughout history there have been appalling atrocities, the kind that make us ashamed to be human. The Holocaust, the Rwandan Genocides, Pol Pot's reign of terror, Stalin and Mao's massacring of millions of their own people, Saddam Hussein's using of the Kurds to test chemical weapons, and that's just to list a few that have happened in the 20th century. We watch these things on the news or read about them in history class and we wonder where Yahveh is in all of this. Why doesn't he do something? Why doesn't he make it right?
Yet what strikes me as odd is that we ask these questions about Yahveh and then read this in the Bible and turn right around and accuse him of being too harsh, too merciless, and even cruel. Well, which do you want? Do you want a god who punishes the guilty and upholds the cause of the oppressed or do you want a nice god who doesn't hurt anybody? Because if you want the former, this is what you are going to get. And if want the latter, you get world where the evil oppress the good with no consequences, with no reckoning.
Yahveh punished Egypt, who richly deserved it. In fact, if you ask me, he went a little light on them. Yet this does not make him any less a god of love. If anything, it proves him even more to be a god of love.
In today's society, we think of love as being essentially rainbows and roses. You forgive everyone (forgiveness meaning, in this case, amnesty). There's no place for punishment in love. A loving person never hurts anyone; no matter what happens, it's okay; just let them go free.
But that is not love. That is weakness. True love defends and protects the ones we love and it demands recompense from those who wrong our loved ones. Not revenge, which is different, but justice. True love requires a sense of justice.
This rainbow and roses concept of love is the product of our sterilized American society. We live our days in a land where nothing bad really happens to us. The atrocities we read about are far away and so we shrug them off because they don't really affect us because we don't understand. It is easy for us to sit back in our armchair and deride the actions of Yahveh as being draconian and unjust and unloving. After all, what the Egyptians did wasn't really that bad.
But go to gas chambers in Auschwitz and Dachau, go to the killing fields of Cambodia, go see the devastation in Rwanda that exists to this day, go to the Soviet gulags of Siberia, go to the wiped out Kurdish villages in Iraq: go there and then come back and tell me that it's "okay," that it's not that bad. Go to these places and tell me that your soul doesn't cry out for Yahveh to do something to the people who did this. And then remember that this is what the Egyptians did to the Israelites for a hundred years.
This story gives me hope. It tells me that Yahveh doesn't just stand back and watch people destroy each other. It tells me that there is a day of reckoning coming for everyone who has abused, murdered, and oppressed others. It tells me all these horrors are not okay and that Yahveh will do something about it. And that thought gives me peace.
A god of rainbows and roses is in the end a useless god. He cannot defend or protect. Instead he gives the wicked a free reign to abuse the weak with no fear of consequence. But a god of justice, like Yahveh, is a god who makes a real difference. He is a god I can depend on; he is a god I can serve.
No comments:
Post a Comment