Haggadah Hoppers
by Eliezer Segal
At many seders, especially those where young children are present, the most conspicuous element in the telling of the exodus might well be an episode that only gets a one-word mention in the text of the Haggadah.
I am referring to the frogs, the second of the ten plagues that were inflicted on the Egyptians. There is something irresistible about the vision of swarms of hopping, croaking little creatures as they “go up and come into thine house, and into thy bedchamber, and upon thy bed, and into the house of thy servants, and upon thy people, and into thine ovens, and into thy kneading troughs.”
The plague is commemorated in lively children’s songs (“…frogs on his head \ and frogs in his bed”), as toys, and in illustrated or animated Haggadahs.
Our fascination with those biblical jumpers has a long history.
The rabbis of the Midrash rarely passed up an occasion to magnify the dimensions of biblical miracles, and they found that the plague of frogs fit that tendency quite nicely once the scriptural text was subjected to their distinctive methods of interpretation.
For example, the biblical account relates how Moses warned Pharaoh that “the frogs shall come up both in thee, and in thy people.” Rabbi Aḥa in the Midrash interpreted this with the utmost literalness, inferring that frogs were spontaneously generated inside the Egyptians‘ bodies from droplets of drinking water.
The rabbis spelled out in imaginative detail the diverse ways in which the frogs bedeviled the Egyptians. Whenever an Egyptian would pour a liquid into a cup, it would instantly be filled with frogs, and when an Egyptian woman would try to knead dough or heat up a stove, the cold-blooded creatures would drop into the dough and cool it off, or enter the stove and get stuck to the bread (Yummy!). This would later be invoked as a source of inspiration for Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah in their readiness to risk martyrdom when Nebuchadnezzar cast them into a fiery furnace.
Rabbi Akiva was famous for finding significance in every letter and particle of the Torah’s wording. This method enabled him to identify biblical sources for many novel teachings of Jewish religious law. In one instance he tried to apply his hermeneutic approach to the plague of the frogs. He noted that the Hebrew text used a grammatically singular form to designate the frogs. Less inventive exegetes would have written this off as merely a collective form designating the whole species. However Rabbi Akiva inferred from this detail that the plague originated with a lone frog that spawned rapidly until its progeny inundated the entire land of Egypt. (Remember that Rabbi Akiva was also the person in the Haggadah who succeeded in multiplying the original ten plagues into fifty—or even two hundred and fifty.)
An alternative version of this interpretation describes how the Egyptians, by smashing one frog, would cause it to spew numerous new ones. The image has been compared to Hercules’ battle against the Lernaean Hydra. (Caution: This kind of Whac-a-mole game might not be advisable at your family’s seder table.)
Rabbi Akiva’s colleague Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah had little patience for such fanciful inventions and remonstrated him: Akiva, you are just not cut out for homiletical expositions. Give them up and confine yourself exclusively to the intricate technical topics of ritual impurity in which you really excel.
Rabbi Eleazar proposed a different explanation of the singular grammatical form of “frog.” He conceded that the plague had begun with a single frog, but not in a way that violated the laws of biology. In his version, the lone frog sounded a tweet that immediately summoned an enormous swarm of fellow-frogs to Pharaoh’s realms. Some commentators suggest that Rabbi Eleazar felt the need to curtail the miraculous proportions of the plague in light of the Torah’s report that the Egyptian court magicians were able to reproduce the trick with their sleight-of-hand.
The Torah relates that when Pharaoh eventually conceded defeat, “Moses cried unto the Lord about the matter [d’var] of the frogs.” Now the root meaning of the Hebrew word ‘d’var” is really “speech” or “word.” Some rabbis regarded this as an indication that the frogs’ voices played a significant part in the plague. “The noises that issued from the frogs were as agonizing as the physical damage that they inflicted.”
Some of the rabbis’ depictions of the plague imbued the frogs with considerable skills in strategic planning, and even some sort of verbal ability. When Rabbi Yoḥanan expounded that a frog was created every time a drop of water landed on soil (perhaps he was basing himself on an ultra-literal reading of the verse in Psalms: “Their land brought forth frogs in abundance”), Rabbi Hezekiah objected that the wealthy Egyptians who dwelled in structures of solid, waterproof marble might thereby be impervious to the plague. He therefore concluded that the frogs negotiated with the marble to allow them access through cracks in the walls and floors.
As noted previously, some rabbis deduced from the wording “the frogs will come in thee, and in thy people” that the plague actually penetrated into the bodies of the Egyptians. Combining this with the legend about making cracks in the marble edifices, they deduced that chips from the split stone pierced and maimed the Egyptians’ private parts. (This reminds me of the scene in Aristophanes’ comedy The Frogs in which the exasperating chorus of croaking frogs provokes Dionysius, on his visit to Hades, to complain crudely about the pains they were causing to his suffering bottom.)
But not everyone held such disdainful opinions about the tonal aesthetics of croaking. The Hebrew mystical compendium “Pereḳ Shirah,” devoted to the theme that all of nature is intoning songs of praise to the creator, begins with an enchanting legend about King David. When the monarch published his book of Psalms he boasted that nobody in the world could produce poetry of comparable grandeur. At this point he met up with a frog who scolded him for his arrogance, claiming that his own lyrical oeuvre was greater than David’s both in its quantity and in the profundity of its message.
Indeed, the frogs’ role was not confined to destruction and harassment. The Jewish sages found some positive aspects to the episode. It exemplified the valuable lessons that no species in creation is superfluous or redundant, and that no person is irreplaceable. For when prophets from Moses to Jonah tried to refuse their missions, the Almighty berated them, arguing: If you don’t accept the assignment, do you imagine that I will not find find a replacment? Even a frog can be recruited to do my will!
According to some teachers, the plague even contributed to international peace. They noted how God instructed Moses to warn Pharaoh that ”I will smite all thy borders with frogs.” Now, the usual connotation of “borders” as political divisions between two states is hardly relevant when speaking of a natural plague. Frogs do not carry passports and are unlikely to turn back at a customs station or concrete wall.
The rabbis therefore concluded that these particular frogs did respect international boundaries, and that fact was an essential component of this unique miracle. The border line between Egypt and neighbouring Ethiopia had been the subject of an ongoing dispute; and therefore, when the infestation of the frogs was seen to stop at specific places, both sides acknowledged that this was supernatural confirmation that Egyptian territory (“thy border”) ended at those places. The Egyptians and Ethiopians could now abandon their hostilities and resume peaceful relations.
As far as I know, the Ethiopians never agreed to pay for a border wall.
- First Publication:
- The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, April 19, 2019, p. 13.
The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, April 19, 2019, p. 13.- For further reading:
- Beit-Arié, Malachi. “Pereḳ Shirah: Introductions and Critical Edition.” Ph.D., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1966. [Hebrew]
- Ginzberg, Louis. Legends of the Jews. Translated by Henrietta Szold. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 2003.
- Heinemann, Isaak. Darkhe Ha-Agadah. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1970. [Hebrew]
- Heschel, Abraham Joshua. Theology of Ancient Judaism. 3 vols. London, UK and New York, NY: The Soncino Press, 1962. [Hebrew]
- Mann, Jacob. The Bible as Read and Preached in the Old Synagogue; a Study in the Cycles of the Readings from Torah and Prophets, as Well as from Psalms, and in the Structure of the Midrashic Homilies. The Library of Biblical Studies. New York: KTAV, 1971. [Hebrew]
- Segal, Eliezer. Beasts That Teach, Birds That Tell: Animal Language in Rabbinic and Classical Literatures. Calgary: Alberta Judaic Library, 2019.
- Shinan, Avigdor, ed. Midrash Shemot Rabbah, Chapters I-XIV. Jerusalem: Dvir, 1984. [Hebrew]
- Slifkin, Nosson. “Sacred Monsters: Mysterious and Mythical Creatures of Scripture, Talmud and Midrash.” Brooklyn, N.Y: Zoo Torah, 2007.
- ———. “Tzefardeaʻ: Frogs or Crocodiles?” Jewish Bible Quarterly 38, no. 4 (2010): 251–54.
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