Josephus, the Jewish historian writing in AD 94, claimed that the name Moses was derived from the ancient Egyptian and, later, Coptic language: mo meaning ‘water’, and uses meaning ‘saved from’. So Moses, saved from death by being cast in a basket on the Nile, is in effect saved by the river itself (probably because of its uniquely irresistible blend of kitsch and entertainment, a rather effective tableau of this event is enacted complete with a baby doll in a basket at the Nileside theme park in Cairo – the redoubtable Dr Ragab’s Pharaonic Village which I have already mentioned).
As the Nile was, effectively, the source of all water in Egypt we can see that Moses, who was saved from the water, is nominally an offspring of the river. The cause of his ‘rebirth’ via the river was, we learn in the Book of Exodus, that the Pharaoh of the time had decreed that all children under a certain age who were of Hebrew origin should be drowned in the Nile. Certainly it would be a quick and obvious way to despatch a large number of unwanted toddlers. (Later, a superstition grew up that anyone who drowned in the Nile would return as a ghost to haunt the living. Perhaps it was the result of so much judicial murder. By the time Caesar won the battle of the Nile in 47 BC, when he installed Cleopatra as queen, the river was no longer a place to have people killed; when he eliminated an opponent he was careful the victim was not drowned or seen as drowned in case he acquired ghostly status among the populace.)
Moses, we know, however, owed his life to the Nile because his mother, Jochebed, constructed a basket of reeds waterproofed with pitch and cleverly sent him downstream to land where the Pharaoh’s daughter was bathing. Miriam, Moses’ sister, asked the smitten daughter of the Pharaoh if she needed a skilled nurse to bring up the child. The answer being yes, Jochebed was introduced as the ideal nurse. So Moses, from being on the Pharaoh’s hit list, gets to be brought up by his own mother in the luxurious high-status environment of the royal court. Result! one is tempted to shout. By cheating the Nile of his death he doesn’t just cling on to life, he is rewarded by becoming a prince.
Earlier in the Bible, in Genesis, Moses is spoken of as being of the second generation of Israelites born in Egypt, descended from Jacob, who had entered Egypt because of a drought in the land of Canaan. One of Moses’ ancestors was Joseph, the eleventh of Jacob’s twelve sons, he of the coat of many colours, who had risen to become the Pharaoh’s right hand because of his ability to interpret dreams. With this background of the royal involvement of the Jews, the stratagem of placing Moses in the royal fold does not seem so unlikely.
However, living as an impostor had its effect on Moses and he became acutely sensitive to the plight of the Jews – who were treated, then, as second-class citizens in Egypt. In one case Moses was so angered by an Egyptian who had beaten a Jew that he killed the Egyptian and then hid the body (thus breaking one of his later commandments). When word got out Moses fled into the Sinai Desert and hid as a shepherd. Here he lived for forty years until God sent him a sign: the burning bush at the foot of Mount Sinai (which can still be seen growing in the delightful grounds of the Christian monastery there today, though, in the absence of any prophets, steadfastly refusing to reignite). Having got Moses’ attention via the flaming foliage, God commanded him to deliver the Hebrews from their bondage in Egypt.
Ask and ye shall receive. But when Moses asked, the Pharaoh refused. After all, this was a useful workforce he would be losing. Moses asked God for help and God didn’t muck around: he sent a plague of blood – turning the waters of the Nile into blood just to scare the Pharaoh. The exact phrasing is useful because it gives an indication of what the ‘plague of blood’ might really have been. Moses relates that God has told him to do the following: ‘With this staff strike the water of the Nile and it will be changed into blood. The fish in the Nile will die, and the river will stink and thus the Egyptians will not be able to drink its water’ (Exodus 7: 17–18).
Pharaoh wouldn’t agree to Moses’ demands so the prophet Aaron, with his staff and under his brother Moses’ guidance, struck the Nile and turned it into a river of blood. Sure enough the river could not be used as water, the fish died and all was calamity. The blood plague on the river lasted for seven days.
Coincidentally the Ipuwer Papyrus from the Eighteenth Dynasty (1550–1300 BC) – Tutankhamen was an Eighteenth Dynasty king – contains some striking parallels to this period of the plagues of Egypt, especially the plague of blood. In the papyrus it states: ‘plague is throughout the land. Blood is everywhere. The river is blood. People shrink from tasting.’ This is one of the few cases where one tradition corroborates the experience of the other.
The papyrus also states that this was a time of upheavals, of servants revolting against their masters. It is not hard to see a parallel with the Hebraic text. Given the needs of oral storytelling and the mythologising required to turn the no doubt confusing events in Egypt into a viral narrative capable of surviving centuries of repetition, it seems perfectly plausible that these events really did occur. Trying to prove that the plagues really happened is usually a nice exercise in creative thinking, yet recent scientific evidence rather suggests that the story is grounded in truth. So if Egypt did suffer ten plagues, what is the first, the blood-red river?
Some have suggested an algal bloom, something similar to the Red Tide of algae seen in the Gulf of Mexico. While the parallels between a harmful algal bloom and a ‘blood river’ are compelling – both of them lower oxygen levels so that fish and plants die – there may be another explanation. Just as the Nile becomes red with silt when the Blue Nile joins the White Nile in the Sudan, so, in the days before any dams were built, an excessive Nile inundation would have seen a blood-red tide sweeping downstream. That the plague of blood lasted only seven days is suggestive of such a one-off flood. The stench left behind after floods have receded – leaving fish stranded and river mud everywhere – also corresponds with the stench reported in the biblical account.
Pharaoh did not give in to the demands of Moses because, apparently, his own magicians could also turn water into blood – perhaps by just mixing a lot of red-coloured silt into it. That the next plague was a plague of frogs confirms the big-flood theory. Frog plagues are, or were until the high dam was built at Aswan, fairly common in Egypt. And they occurred at the time of the Nile inundation in the summer. So after the excessive flood came a huge number of frogs to plague the inhabitants of the Red Nile still more.
We’ve seen that the plague of blood and the plague of frogs could have a natural explanation. But what about the rest? It took ten plagues of increasing severity to persuade the Pharaoh to let Moses and his people go.
Plague three was a plague of lice. Some scientists have rather arrogantly concluded that ancient Egyptians would have been unable to distinguish between lice and ‘invisible’ biters such as ticks and midges and small mosquitoes. Having spent time with illiterate Bedouin who were well aware of the differences, I think it highly improbable that lice meant anything other than lice. Lice are spread by contact. Perhaps in the confusion engendered by the plagues people neglected normal hygiene and lice prospered.
Plague four was a plague of flies – quite possibly mosquitoes or disease-spreading flies of some kind such as midges or sandflies. If the fish had rotted and died on the banks of the river a plague of flies may have resulted. Egypt is relatively fly free compared to other parts of Africa, so a plague of flies would have been unusual and vexatious. Fortunately for the Jews, Goshen, a place in the Egyptian delta where they lived, was beyond the area where sandflies live.
Plague five was a plague of animal deaths. The account in Exodus states that donkeys and camels were killed but not pigs or goats. This curious anomaly has led scientists to conclude that this was a plague of African horse sickness or bluetongue, viral diseases spread by the midges of the fourth plague. These diseases affect the animals mentioned in the Bible but not those omitted, swine and goats.
You’d think the Pharaoh would have had enough by now, what with his camels and donkeys kee
ling over. But no – he still refused to let Moses and his people leave. So another plague it was. Plague six was a plague of boils. This could well have been an outbreak of cutaneous anthrax, typically contracted by handling the corpses of infected carriers. Since anthrax can be passively carried by camels and donkeys, perhaps the surfeit of dead ones lying around caused an outbreak. Cutaneous anthrax, which produces unsightly purple boils, is rarely fatal, though it can lead to blood toxaemia and death in certain circumstances.
Plague seven was a plague of hail. In the winter, visitors to Egypt are shocked at how chilly it can get. I’ve been in a hailstorm in the Western Desert – a place where it isn’t even supposed to rain (though it does). It has snowed once in Cairo in the last century and probably hailed a dozen times. So this ‘plague’, which would accompany a particularly cold winter, though unusual, even somewhat freakish, is perfectly believable, even in the hot climate we expect of Egypt.
Still no joy from Pharaoh. And let’s face it, hail isn’t that scary. So for plague eight God decided to get really mean: plague eight was a plague of locusts. In any country in the Middle East locusts swarming can mean everything is eaten and famine is certain. People are genuinely scared by such things. Again, during a residence of seven years in Egypt, I was present during two locust scares – both originating in the upper Nile and heading north. In one, a plague of locusts flew up the Nile munching most of what got in their way, only stopping a few miles from the outskirts of Cairo. For weeks afterwards I found windblown locusts dying in the sandy wadis on the eastern side of Cairo. A plague of locusts, in an era without pesticides or early-warning systems and aerial observation, is very believable. The Israelites, living in Goshen – now the eastern delta region – being north of Memphis (present-day Cairo), would have been the last to be affected by the locusts, which, by then, may have ceased to swarm. Once all the crops of the Egyptians had been eaten they would have been reduced to eating old supplies of grain – which led, many believe, to the tenth and final plague.
But before that was plague nine: a plague of darkness. Despite there being evidence that the Santorini volcanic explosion of 1652 BC distributed vast amounts of ash in the Nile and delta regions it is less easy to connect this with the plague of darkness (and the plague of blood), as some have tried to do. The argument here is that the eruption caused the darkness as the ash obscured the sky, and then it entered the river, making it turn blood red. If we are to allow the sequence any validity, then the plague of darkness would have come first and the plague of blood later. But setting that aside, a far more reasonable explanation of the plague of darkness is something I’ve experienced myself in Cairo: a khamsin, or duststorm. The fact that the plague of darkness lasts three days is also suggestive – sandstorms (really duststorms, as pure sandstorms do not rise more than ten feet off the ground) can easily block out the sun for several days. The arrival of a sudden and severe khamsin after a prediction of darkness would have a huge impact on those who experienced it.
The final plague is the most intriguing in a way, and the hardest to explain. The tenth plague was a death plague on firstborn sons. Very nasty in a patriarchal society where the firstborn son tends to get all the love and attention. But herein lies the clue: the firstborn are the most dominant – in any patriarchal society. After the collapse of agriculture following the preceding plagues there would have been acute food shortages. Secret stores of grain would have been worth a fortune – and available only to those who were dominant: the firstborn sons. But grain stored for too long is subject to mycotoxins, surface-growing fungi, a potential cause of rapid death. It has been proposed that a group of the most dominant citizens – largely firstborn sons – helped themselves to a last supply of grain that was infected by mycotoxins. These can kill through mere inhalation. When they all died, the rumour that there was a plague on firstborn sons would have spread rapidly.
The Jews themselves were spared: by virtue of their eating the Passover meal, the angel of death ignored them. But this meal – of newborn lamb and unleavened bread – was available to the Jews because they still had some food, the locusts having left them alone. Thus, unaffected by the previous plagues, they were not reduced to raiding old grain stores. In a sense the Passover was symptomatic of their survival rather than a cause of it.
No leader can stand by and watch all the firstborn sons perish; the Pharaoh wilted and allowed Moses to leave. But being a bad old Pharaoh, he naturally changed his mind just as they set out on their journey. Jumping into their chariots, the Egyptian army sped north to stop the Jews escaping into the Sinai and home to Canaan.
8 • Moses crosses the Red Nile
A fool and water follow where they are led. Egyptian proverb
The chariots jostled and fought their way along the dusty roads to the delta. The Jews, fleeing with all their baggage and herds and belongings, could see the dust rising far behind them. Time for Moses to call a friend. Or at least pull a new trick out of the bag. The obvious way to the Sinai would have involved following the coastal route of the Mediterranean – and this is where things become confusing, since there is no Red Sea around – just the Med on one side and the Gulf of Suez on the other – the Red Sea doesn’t start until you are some way down the Egyptian coast. So the identity of the sea that parts is the first problem. Then, did the Pharaoh’s troops get swept away to their deaths? It seems such a singular occurrence one suspects it has some basis in truth, though exaggerated to make it memorable at a time when stories were there to be told and not read.
In the Hebrew version of Exodus the sea is known as Yam Suph, suph also being used to mean reeds in other parts of the Old Testament. So, bizarrely – since it works in English as well as Hebrew – the Red Sea might actually be the Reed Sea. As early as the eleventh century AD, the French Talmudic scholar Rashi wrote that the Red Sea should be known as the Sea of Reeds.
There is no doubt, too, as one notes when one studies Herodotus, who came many centuries after Moses’ time, that the Nile delta has always been subject to change – as one would expect after 3,000 years of heavy floods and silting up. A no longer extant branch of the Nile, the so-called Pelusian arm (from the Greek pelous meaning ‘silty’ or ‘muddy’), also known as ‘the brook of Egypt’, extended further to the north and west than the existing Suez Canal. What was known as the Lake of Tanis may well have been an extensive muddy lake fed by this branch of the Nile and occupying the area now bisected by the Suez Canal.
In Exodus we read, ‘The Lord caused the sea to go back with a strong east wind.’ If we were talking about the real Red Sea, or even the Gulf of Suez, an east wind would simply have caused massive waves to break on the eastern shore of Egypt – hardly a great escape route. However, a lake lying on an east–west axis would be denuded of water by a high easterly wind. Carl Drews, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, in 2010 designed a computer model of such a lake to find out whether a wind could expose underlying mudflats. He discovered that a 63mph wind, less powerful than the hurricane-force winds of 1987 in the UK – in fact merely a very strong gale – would be capable of blowing back the water of such a river-filled lake and leaving the bed exposed.
The ‘Reed Sea’ blocked the escape route of the Israelites because it lay between the marshy coastline and the desert further inland. It would also have been a direct route from Memphis to the Sinai. Perhaps a strong wind did open up a way across the mudflats of the Red Nile, a route that the hasty and blood-seeking Pharaoh’s army were unable to follow . . . or perhaps they did. At which point the wind mysteriously died and a wave of water engulfed the unlucky seekers of vengeance.
9 • The Moses mystery
When they hit a fool, a wise person sitting nearby learns. Nubian proverb
Moses, watching the water engulf his enemies, escapes to the Sinai Desert. Here he goes up Mount Sinai and receives the ten commandments from God. He and the tribe then wander for forty years and eventually make it to the banks of the Jorda
n – the promised land. Moses is forbidden to enter the promised land because of an earlier transgression, so it is up to his brother Aaron to lead them in.
Back to the Nile. Just who was the Pharaoh either washed away or left behind fuming on the bank? This is where it gets tricky. In the Bible only one Pharaoh is named – Shishaq. He sacks Jerusalem and generally does battle in the land now known as Israel. For many years it was assumed that Shishaq was the leader whom the Egyptians called Shoshenq, a pharaoh who invaded Canaan – where the Jews lived. The similarity in name and the battles recorded make a pretty good case, though not everyone agrees. But he was not the Pharaoh of the exodus.
Any pharaoh with ‘Moses’ or something similar-sounding in their name – Tuthmoses, Ra-moses – has been drafted in as a potential pharaoh of Moses’ time. Again there is little to back this up.
Sceptics have pointed to the lack of Egyptian literature documenting the ten plagues. Yet without the theological imperative provided by the Moses story there is little reason for the Egyptians to consider the plagues as anything more than plain bad luck – so why write about them as a special case? The so-called Famine Stele refers to a seven-year period of famine in the Third Dynasty (roughly 2685–2615 BC) long before Moses’ time, yet this stele, inscribed in granite on an island in the Nile near Aswan, was actually carved much later – around 300 BC. It is therefore probably tapping into the wide Middle Eastern mythology of seven-year famines, which occur in the Epic of Gilgamesh (at 3,800 years old, one of the oldest literary works discovered) as well as the Bible. Mythological famines were something worth writing about in the mystico-religious hieroglyphic language; real ones probably weren’t. So the misfortunes, including floods and famines, would all have been part of the experience of life along the Egyptian Nile when Moses was alive.
Most students of archaeology have plumped for Ramses II as the Pharaoh who went head to head with Moses. This is because of his prominence and because of his ambitious building programme mentioned at the beginning of the Book of Exodus. A more compelling case, however, can be made for the Pharaoh Khaneferre, whose name is unique in the list of kings compiled by Menetho – unlike Ramses, of which there are many. Why is this an important point? Because Khaneferre is referred to as Moses’ adopted father in the writings of the Jewish historian Artapanus. More compellingly, Artapanus compiled his work in the third century BC, when there would have been many more original records available in Egyptian temples and in the library in Alexandria, the greatest library of the ancient world, started around 300 BC in the city created by Alexander the Great. If Artapanus was simply making up a yarn, why choose such an obscure pharaoh? Why not go for an obvious one such as Ramses II? And, if he was operating at random, statistically an obscure name like Khaneferre is less likely to be chosen than the several versions of Ramses.
Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River Page 11