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Showing posts from January, 2021

Parshat Va'era -- Living Through the Chain Reaction

Greta Hort notes that one thing that stands out about the Egyptian plagues is their relationship to natural phenomena that occur in Egypt’s ecosystem.  And Professor Ziony Zevit tells us that using this theory the first six plagues can even be explained in their sequential order. The naturalistic account is connected initially with the violent rainstorms that occur in the mountains of Ethiopia, to the south of Egypt. 1. The first plague, referred to as dam, blood, was caused when red clay swept down into the Nile from the Ethiopian highlands coloring the river and rendering its water undrinkable. 2. The mud affected the aeration of the water that lead to the death of fish. Bodies of dead fish clogged the swamps inhabited by frogs. The rotting fish crowded the frogs out from the swamps. They left the Nile and sought cool areas in people's houses: the second plague. But, the movement of frogs occurred only after they had become infected by some communicable disease. 3-4. Since the