Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Charles David Isbell" <cisbell AT home.com>]

I hope Niels will be pleased that we have found an issue on which he and I
can fully agree.  Not only is he correct  that the Thera explanation strains
the credulity by demanding a series of coincidences, but there is an even
higher hurdle for those who wish to take seriously the biblical account.
Attributing the plagues (one or all of them) to natural phenomena because we
are so advanced in our understanding beyond the poor, simple Hebrews
actually turns the biblical portrayal on its head.  And surely there is no
one on the list who would argue that volcanic ash from somewhere else killed
just the first born and not everyone else!

I have shown elsewhere (CCAR Journal, Winter 1999) that the Hebrew narrative
is a direct attack on the Egyptian myth of succession whereby a living Horus
at his death becomes Osiris while his FIRST BORN immediately becomes Horus
incarnate in his stead.  This provided Egypt with a seamless transition of
power from one ruler to another, and led David Gunn to remark that the
biblical story scarcely distinguishes between the Pharaoh of chapters one
and two and  the ruler with whom Moses debated.  Though the text tells us
that the first Pharaoh had died, yet the effects of his policy could not
have seemed diminished under the rule of his successor.  One Horus is dead,
long live Horus.  And this was intended to go on forever, seamlessly as I
have stated.  The narrative reason for the killing of the first born rather
than making a direct attack on and killing the Pharaoh himself, who was
after all the true cause of the problem, was to debunk the Egyptian myth by
showing that YHWH alone controlled life and death.  The deity who darkened
the sun in the land of Ra, who polluted the mother goddess Nile, who brought
death and disease via an insect that was worshipped as the symbol of
fertility--this deity and this deity alone, according to the biblical story,
blew back the waters of YAM SUF and created liberation.

Now when a foundational myth of one group of people has as its direct
purpose the debunking of a foundation myth of another people, we are
entitled to believe that the narrative itself is telling us that its
interest is in something other than "mere" history.  The argument cannot be
simply between those who take the Bible seriously and those of us who are
perceived not to do so because our understanding of a particular event is
not informed by natural causation as an explanation of a sacred text.  I
believe by taking the biblical text seriously, and allowing it to make its
theological affirmation as it intends to do about the sovereignty of YHWH,
we are entitled to assume that the ancients were smart enough to have
recognized a natural phenomenon and would have labeled it properly even
while attributing it to YHWH.  But the argument being made seems to be that
the ancients thought (ha ha) that God did a miracle, but we moderns know
that it was a volcano that fooled them into thinking YHWH had acted for
them.  How quaint!

And the lengths to which we go to "prove" a particular view of the story.  A
fire hundreds of feet high so that two million people could see it at once?
Surely such a fire would have scared hell (sic!) out of the poor simple
souls presumed to have been completely fogged over by a series of fortuitous
natural disasters that they foolishly assumed YHWH did for their benefit.

To this day, I along with millions of other Jews on Pesah, begin recounting
the story of the exodus with the words, (avadim hayinu, "we used to be
slaves."  That the biblical story reflects a kernel of some event thousands
of years ago I do not doubt.  But for me, the story is far more than a once
for all, one time only literary artifact to be dusted off once in a while
and defended against skeptics like Niels.  It is a foundational myth of
faith that teaches a clear perspective about who YHWH was/is and the lengths
to which we believe He will go to create liberation and defeat oppression.
No single story, chained to a single point in time and imprisoned in a
single naturalistic, rationalistic explanation, could function over
centuries of time as the world's greatest myth about liberation and freedom
wrought by the God of the little guy, YHWH.  Explaining away the story
destroys it.

Doffing the cap to Niels, Sign Me,
Charles David Isbell, a true believer in Baton Rouge.