Exodus redux

Just recently, Douglas Stuart published a major new commentary on Exodus. Stuart has a doctorate from Harvard, along with a working knowledge of Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Egyptian, Ugaritic, Akkadian, Syriac, and Arabic, among other ancient languages.

Here is some of what he has to say about the Exodus:

“’Blood’ is a color in Hebrew as well as a substance, just as in English, and no firm data exists for the interpreter to differentiate in this story between the possibility that the Nile and other surface water turn to actual blood from the possibility that the waters turned—for whatever reason—‘blood’ in color [n.38],” D. Stuart, Exodus (Broadman & Holman 2006), 199.

“It has often been suggested that the Hb. Word for ‘blood,’ ‘dam,’ is actually a biform of the Hb. word for red/be red, ‘adam’…The word’s use in connoting the color (dark) red is found in Joel 2:30-31 [Hb. 3:3-4]…and 2 Kgs 3:22-23,” ibid. 199, n.38.

As the following verse (7:25) indicates, the plague of blood lasted only seven days. Virtually all commentators have observed that the plagues appear to have increased in intensity from first to last. How, then, could this plague be regarded as the least threatening of the ten? The answer is that this plague involved not the changing of water into real blood…but the temporary reddening and contamination of the Nile and other surface water in a way that made the Nile undrinkable and killed its fish. This plague functioned more as a severe frustration for Egyptians than as a threat to life. Fish died from this plague, but humans and other animals did not,” ibid. 200-01.

“The Egyptian people, however, had to scramble to get water, which was available only from new wells. Subsurface water had not been affected; the miracle of the first plague was limited in its lethality to fish—people were merely greatly inconvenienced,” ibid. 202.

The first plague produced great inconvenience, requiring the digging of (shallow) wells along the Nile as opposed to the easy access to drinking water that the Nile usually afforded, and it also produced the death of large quantities of fish. Spatially, it was limited to places where water was visible on the surface of the ground,” ibid. 204.

“This implicit connection of the wording of the fifth plague to that of the second is yet further evidence that the plague stories are highly integrated, composed as a unit, and therefore expect the reader to be thinking of the elements of all of them as he or she reads any particular one. Specifically, the cyclic nature of the composition of the first nine plague accounts means that the reader is presumed to have especially in mind what happened in the second plague, the initial plague of the ‘second cycle’ when reading the account of the fifth plague, the next account in that cycle,” ibid. 222-23.

“The verse [9:6] also contains a translation choice in the NIV that creates a possible misimpression for the reader. The NIV translation ‘all the livestock of the Egyptians died’ would seem to suggest that no Egyptian livestock survived the plague, especially when this statement is followed by the (correctly translated) statement ‘but not one animal belonging to the Israelites died.’ Yet when one reads on to the account of the seventh plague, it is clear that there were plenty of Egyptian livestock still alive, since they are mentioned as being in danger of being killed by the next plague, that of ferocious hail (9:19-21). Moreover, Egyptian livestock are described as alive at the advent of the account of the final plague, that of the death of the firstborn (122:29). This apparent contradiction is not due to inconsistency among the plague accounts, multiple contradictory sources for them, or any similar cause. It is due simply to the fact that the Hebrew word ‘kol,’ usually translated ‘all,” can mean ‘all sorts of’ [n.88] or ‘from all over’ or ‘all over the place’ [n.89]. In this verse, the better translation of the full expression would be ‘all sorts of Egyptian livestock died’ or “Egyptian livestock died all over the place,” ibid. 223-24.

“That ‘kol’ can mean ‘all sorts of’ or the like is well known. E.g. it is usually translated either ‘all sorts of” or ‘all kinds of’ in modern Eng. translations in the following sampling of contexts from early and late biblical Hebrew: Gen 4:22; 24:10; 40:17; Exod 35:22; Lev 19:23; Deut 6:11; 2 Kgs 8:9; 1 Chr 18:10; 22:15; 29:2; 2 Chr 2:14; 32:27-28; Neh 9:25; 13:15; 13:20; Ps 45:13; Prov 1:13; Eccl 2:5; Ezek 8:10; 27:22; 39:20; 47:12,” ibid. 223, n.88.

“So commonly in the Hb. expression ‘all Israel,’ which in many contexts refers only to representatives (e.g. 1 Sam 12:1; 1 Kgs 18:19; 1 Chr 11:1; 15:3) or soldiers (Josh 8:24) or leaders from all segments of the nation (2 Chr 1:2) or the like, not literally to every single Israelite’,” ibid. 224, n.89.

“Barns were for storing grain, not animals. There is evidence of stabling war horses in Egypt and Israel, but not with certainty cattle…Animals were often kept in courtyards at night…Some of those courtyards had pillar and root shelters…the only way most Egyptians could have put their cattle under cover would have been to bring them right into their living spaces or into grain storage barns, where there may have been some empty space in light of the time of year (just before the first spring harvests were to be collected). Cf. J. S. Holladay, “The Stables of Ancient Israel,” in The Archaeology of Jordan and Other studies (Andrews University Press, 1986), 103-65; L. E. Stager, “The Archaeology of the Family in Ancient Israel,” BASOR 260 (1985): 1-35; P. J. King & L. Stager, Life in Biblical Israel (Westminster John Knox 2001),” ibid. 235, n116.

“In Egypt flax and barley were harvested in February-March…Wheat and spelt, however, were harvested in March-April, a full month later, that is, at the time of the tenth plague and the exodus itself; they were too small this time to be permanently damaged by the hailstorm. Though the wheat and sepal shoots were up and growing, surely were smashed down by the hail, they were able to recover and continue to grow fairly normally,” ibid. 241.