Who Turned Out the Lights?
When interpreting the many wonders related in the Bible, classical Jewish commentators can often be divided into two opposing schools. At one extreme stand those who wish to enhance the supernatural dimensions in order to magnify the power of a deity who transcends the limitations of nature. Ranged against them are those who insist that our knowledge of God is rooted principally in the recognition that his universe is governed by eternally unchanging laws of nature and rationality; and hence any suspension of those laws would weaken the theological foundations of religious belief.
It is to the latter group that I wish to direct my attention in this article. Over the centuries many distinguished Jewish exegetes and thinkers tried to understand the ten Egyptian plagues in ways that did not demand naive credulity or denials of observable experience. This was particularly difficult to do in the case of the ninth plague, that of darkness, concerning which the Torah states that it was tangible (according to the standard translations), that it lasted three days and that it affected only the Egyptians but not the Hebrews. The Torah also states “neither rose any [Egyptian] from his place for three days,” implying that it somehow prevented the victims from moving. All this is very hard to explain in terms of any normal optical or meteorological process.
Perhaps the earliest formulation of a scientific approach to the question was that of the philosopher Philo Judaeus of Alexandria. He ascribed the plague to a combination of known scientific phenomena: a total solar eclipse that completely blocked out the sunlight, and extremely thick clouds.
Rabbi Moses Nahmanides would later stress that this darkness was not merely an absence of light such as we normally experience at nighttime, but a supernaturally palpable mist that descended from the heavens. Rabbi Obadiah Sforno would develop this idea, insisting on a fundamental difference between normal night air that is capable of absorbing sunlight at daybreak, and the darkness of the ninth plague that consisted of a dense substance whose texture is entirely impermeable to light. Abravanel explained that the Egyptian darkness consisted of the same dense hot winds that had blown away the locusts of the previous plague and now continued to hover over Egypt in the form of thick impenetrable clouds that blocked out sunlight. In a somewhat similar vein Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks preferred to ascribe the darkness to one of those seasonal sandstorms that blow into Egypt from the Sahara blocking out light and air for several days.
As regards the Torah’s statement that the Egyptians were unable to stand up during the three days of the plague, a well-known midrashic tradition understood this to mean that they were encased in a cement-like substance that physically prevented them from moving their bodies. Gersonides and Don Isaac Abravanel imagined it as a kind of toxic smog.
Several interpreters argued that the Egyptians’ inability to move during the plague was really a psychological symptom of their plight. Thus, Josephus Flavius wrote that the extreme density of the air caused people to perish not only due to respiratory difficulties, but also because they were shocked into immobility by terror at their predicament. This was also the view of the Apocryphal work “Wisdom of Solomon.” Abravanel illustrated this thesis by providing a thorough diagnosis of personalities who are overcome by a hysterical blindness after being traumatized repeatedly by intense suffering. This, he proposed, what happened to the Egyptians on a mass scale.
Many commentators posed the question: why didn’t the Egyptians just turn on the lights, or at least light lamps or torches in order to overcome the darkness? Josephus suggested that this option was not really available to them, either because the darkness was so thick as to overcome any puny man-made illumination, or because it was accompanied by a violent storm whose winds extinguished flame. Nahmanides compared the phenomenon to the way a fire subsides at the bottom of a deep pit or in “mountains of darkness.” (He did not relate this process to the presence or absence of oxygen, nor did he suggest that the Egyptians had difficulty breathing during the plague.)
The fact that the Israelites were immune to the darkness and “had light in their dwellings” would also appear to be inconsistent with any naturalistic reading of the story. Nevertheless some interpreters, like Abravanel, took it to mean that the darkness did not extend to the territory of Goshen where the Jews had their residence.
Philo, on the other hand, suggested that this detail might reflect a fundamental difference in moral psychology between crude heathens and enlightened monotheists. The former are stricken helpless when deprived of their faculty of physical sight, whereas the latter continue to maintain their moral compass as “beams of virtue” give continual direction to the “eyes of the soul.”
Deflecting the question of how the plague’s three-day duration could be measured if there were no intervals of light to differentiate between the days, Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra wrote that he personally had experienced such prolonged periods of utter blackness—up to five days—during his oceanic travels. Presumably he was describing dense maritime fog. Ibn Ezra travelled widely during his itinerant career, including some stopovers in northern France and perhaps England, so his mention of the “ocean” might literally allude to the Atlantic.
Some traditional commentators took a similar approach of locating the darkness not in the atmosphere or geography of Egypt, but in the physiology of the Egyptians’ eyes. Thus Rabbi Jacob Meklenburg in his Ha-Ketav ve-ha- Ḳabbalah dismissed all the ingenious theories involving miraculous mists, uninterrupted nights or extinguished lamps; arguing instead that the Egyptians were afflicted with a kind of cataracts that grew as an opaque membrane that covered their eyes and filtered out light.
The last word has not been said on the question, and perhaps the lively discussion at your Passover seder will provide an opportunity to shed new light on this venerable puzzle.
- First Publication:
- The Alberta Jewish News, Edmonton and Calgary, March 15, 2021, p. 22.
- For further reading:
- Feldman, Louis H. “Josephus’ Portrait of Moses. Part Three.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 83, no. 3/4 (1993): 301–30.
- Koskenniemi, Erkki. The Old Testament Miracle-Workers in Early Judaism. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen Zum Neuen Testament., 2. Reihe. Mohr Siebeck, 2005.
- Langner, Allan M. “The Ninth Plague.” Jewish Bible Quarterly 29, no. 1 (2001): 48–55.
- Roth, Norman Dennis. “Abraham Ibn Ezra: Highlights of His Life.” Iberia Judaica, no. 4 (2012): 25–39.
- Sacks, Jonathan. Exodus, the Book of Redemption. 1st ed. Covenant & Conversation. New Milford, CT: Maggid Books & The Orthodox Union, 2010.
- Schneider, Stanley, and Morton H Seelenfreund. “The Plague of Darkness: Hysterical Blindness?” Jewish Bible Quarterly 46, no. 3 (July 2018): 179–88.
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