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In the first place, thanks to the vast amount of research in the archeology of Egypt, we now know that these ten plagues were a contest between the Lord God of the Israelites, and the pantheon of Egypt.

As we shall later see, the Egyptians were the most polytheistic nation that ever lived. In their pantheon of deities there were more than twenty-two hundred gods and goddesses, and each of them had a particular theophany. That is to say, these gods and goddesses had certain animals that were sacred to them, and in which animal form the particular god or goddess occasionally manifested a personal presence. So very often the deities of Egypt are depicted in stone and painting as having a human body, but an animal head. Thus Thoth might be seen with the head of an ibis, while Hathor sometimes has a human head, but more often she is portrayed with the head of a cow.

So there was no animal that the Hebrews could sacrifice to their God, Jehovah, that would not be sacred to some Egyptian deity. This sacrifice would constitute blasphemy in the eyes of the Egyptian masters, and trouble would eventuate immediately! Indeed, when Pharaoh, worn out by the troubles brought upon him by the plagues, suggested to Moses that the people sacrifice to Jehovah without going to the wilderness, Moses simply replied in the language that is recorded in Exodus 8:26:

"What shall we sacrifice, that will not be an abomination in the eyes of the Egyptians? Will they not stone the people if they sacrifice in the land?"

The justice of the reply was so self-apparent that the ruler did not press his suggestion, as the text shows. Thus God forced the issue and provoked the conflict that not only freed His people from slavery and eventually established them in the land that He had promised them through Abraham, but also showed His supremacy over the gods of Egypt. Even more than that, in the resultant series of events, the Lord God brought such glory to His own Name, and showed such omnipotence that the world has never forgotten this drama, even to our own day and time. Witness the very article that is the subject of this present comment!

Thus we see that at Thebes, the principal triad of deities consists of Amon-Ra, the king of all the gods, Mut, his Wife, and Khons, their son.

Ba-neb-Ded, with his wife Het-mehit, and their son Harpakhrad constituted the triad at Mendes. In like manner, the Memphis triad was composed of Ptah, Sekhmet, and Imhotep. Sometimes the greater gods were grouped into a company of nine, called the Ennead. There was also the grouping of the major deities into the "Three Companies," being the gods of the heaven, the earth, and the Other or Under World.

All the gods had human bodies, but some of them had animal heads. Sometimes a god who customarily had a human head would appear wearing the animal head of his theophany, as in the case of Hathor, cited above. Thus when Hathor appears with a cow's head upon a human body, she appears with the solar disk between her horns; and when she appears with the human head, she wears as a headdress the bonnet of the goddess Mut, the wife of Amon-Ra, the horns of the cow, the solar disk which shows her relationship to Horus, and the feather of the goddess Maat.

The First Plague was a direct and definite blow at a numerous company of these objects of worship. In the first place, the River Nile was itself an object of worship. It was reputed to flow from the celestial stream called Nu, and was heavenly in its origin. It brought life to the entire land of Egypt, and was worshipped with appropriate and very exact ritual. There were hymns to the Nile, prayers and offerings to and for the Nile, and the river possessed in itself a very real personality. The River is pictured in the form of a man wearing a cluster of water plants upon his head, and the idea of fertility is conveyed by giving him the heavy pendant breasts of a nursing mother! In the British Museum may be seen a remarkable papyrus, containing the Hymn to the Nile. To show the reverence felt for the power of the great River, we quote just a sentence or two from this Hymn:

... Thou art the Lord of the poor and needy. If thou wert overthrown in the heavens, the gods would fall upon their faces, and men would perish....

This deified river, then, the source of life and blessing in Egypt, was smitten by God, and its waters turned to blood. Frantically the Egyptians sought to dig shallow wells by the banks of the stream, as their water supply failed them for the first time in the memory of man! Truly, Jehovah was greater than the Nile! And not only greater than the River itself, there was more than this involved. There were many issues involved, and many deities suffered "loss of face" that day!

There was the mighty Osiris, who was himself the cause and source of the resurrection and of everlasting life. Greatest of all the gods of the underworld, he has an important part in the text of the Book of the Dead. The Nile was supposed to be his bloodstream! When God smote the Nile, he laid the mighty Osiris low in the dust! With him fell Hapi--who was the Nile-god, and also Satet, the wife of Khnemu, the goddess of the annual inundation. Her divine sister, Anqet, bit the dust that day, as she was the personification of the Nile waters, which turned into an offense and a stench when Moses stretched out his staff. Time will not permit the presentation of the characters of Isis-Sothis, Isis-Hathor, Ament, Menat, Renpit and at least two score more, all of whom met defeat in the First Plague. None of them could sustain their prestige and power in the face of the action of Jehovah, and He emerged victorious in the first trial of strength.

The Second Plague was likewise a contest between the Lord of the heavens and the earth, and certain specific ideas of the Egyptian system of worship. The plague of frogs that covered the land, making life a burden to the people, was a blow struck at Heqt, the wife of the great Khnum, whose theophany was a frog. Indeed, she was called the "frog-goddess," and this lowly creature was sacred to her. The frog was the symbol of the resurrection, and the emblem of fertility. It was reverenced by the people, and to have one around the dwelling place was a sign of good fortune and was supposed to ensure a fertile year for farm and family alike.

They got enough of this quaint object of reverence when God flooded their land with myriads of the beastly things! They were in the bread-trough, and got tangled up in the dough, thus adding a rather quaint flavor to the bread! The bread could not be baked, however, as the baking ovens crawled with frogs, and the fires could not be lighted. They hopped all over the master of the house, and when he sought his bed in disgust they were there before him.

Like a blanket of filth the slimy, wet monstrosities covered the land, until men sickened at the continued squashing crunch of the ghastly pavement they were forced to walk upon. If a man's feet slipped on the greasy mass of their crushed bodies, he fell into an indescribably offensive mass of putrid uncleanness, and when he sought water to cleanse himself, the water was so solid with frogs, he got no cleansing there. In sheer desperation the mighty king was forced to beg, "Call off your frogs, and I will let the people go!" Read Exodus 8:1-15.

It is a bit difficult to imagine that generation of Egyptians ever worshipping the Frog again.

When we come to the Fifth Plague, we are again on solid and assured territory. Once more firm archeological ground supports the theme of this chapter. When God smote the cattle of Egypt, He dealt most definitely and drastically with Egyptian polytheism. There were many of the supreme objects of Egyptian worship that met their Waterloo in the murrain on the cattle.

Chief of these is the mighty and venerated Hathor. She was the "cow-goddess" that was universally worshipped in all the land, and was to the human race of that day the "mother" principle of deity. Her most common name in the Egyptian language is Het-Hert, which literally means "the House of Horus." The House of Horus is that portion of the sky where Horus lives and is daily born, namely, the east. Hathor is depicted in antiquity in many forms. Always she appears with a human body, and may sometimes have a human head as well. But more often she has a cow's head on a human body, as the cow was her symbol. She often walked the land in the theophany of a cow, and one could tell when a calf was born, whether Hathor had come to earth, or not.

When this great goddess is pictured with a human head, she wears an impressive headdress. This is composed of the spreading horns of a cow, between which are seen the bonnet of Mut, the divine wife of Amon-Ra, the king of the gods. Above this is seen the solar disk, as Hathor was of "The Great Company" and was associated with all the beneficence of the glorious and life-giving sun. The Book of the Dead teaches that Hathor provides nourishment for the soul in the other-world, and as such a provider she excels all the minor gods. So in all the forms in which she is carved or drawn, she wears the sacred uraeus, to show her exalted power.

When God smote the cattle, her especial symbol, He struck a mighty blow at the tottering system for which Pharaoh had confidently expressed his preference. The other forays were but skirmishes: this was a real and decisive battle! This shrewd and telling victory was the beginning of the end of the conflict. If the divine Hathor could not protect her faithful following from the power of Jehovah, who could?

For not only Hathor was thus challenged and defeated, but other important members of the Heavenly Company met defeat and disgrace in the plague that smote the cattle. A common object in the Egypt of that day was the sacred bull, Apis, whose power was vast indeed. His temples dotted the land, and the priests of his cult were many and their power was impressive in the extreme. On the forehead of Apis appears the sacred triangle of eternity, and on his back is always seen the sacred scarab, with spread wings.

Apis was the theophany of the god whose name was Ptah-Seker-Asar, and he also was one of the triune resurrection gods. The living worshipped him that they might live again in the world to come, and the dead, of course, all worshipped him because he had made them to live again. Now, alas, for those who trusted in him against Jehovah! He could not even defend his own earth-form from the blight that his new enemy, Jehovah, had sent on all that represented the great and powerful Ptah-Seker-Asar. Thus God humbled the sacred Apis in the same stroke that crushed the cult of Hathor.

To this record must also be added the name of Nut, the goddess of the sky, and the wife of Geb. She it was who produced the egg out of which the sun hatched, so in reality she preceded Horus and even Amon-Ra, even though they ascended to a higher power and authority later. She is depicted with a female human body, and the head of a cow. However, she does not wear the solar disk, nor the headdress of Hathor, as she was a little lower in the social company of the weird organization of nonsense and mysticism that was the religion of Egypt.

The simple summary of the whole record is just this: all the gods of Egypt were not able to defend the cattle, when the Lord God Jehovah stretched out His hand to smite them! This the people of Egypt were forced to concede, as their cattle died by the thousand before their bewildered eyes, while not one of the herds of Israel lost so much as one head of cattle by the murrain.

The Sixth and Seventh Plagues are simple to deal with, as the record of Egypt gives valuable aid to the unprejudiced student here. Imhotep was the god of medicine, and the guardian of all the healing sciences. Prayers were made to him for protection as well as for cures, and he was greatly revered. In like manner, Reshpu and Qetesh were the gods of storm and of battle, and they controlled all the natural elements except the light. So the noisome and painful boils struck the devotees of Imhotep and left him powerless to aid his praying following, and their plight was pitiful indeed. How little it helped to see that the followers of the god Jehovah, at whom Pharaoh had sneered with ridicule, were comfortable, and with unblemished skins! No suppurating sores advertised the pain of the Hebrews; the good hand of their God was upon them, to protect them from the very disaster that came upon all the Egyptians for Israel's sake!

The medical man of the twentieth century, whose article we are now considering, attributes all this painful consequence to the bacteriological pollution of the Nile, which was accomplished by the skill and wisdom of Moses. The present writer of this refutation is not utterly ignorant of the science of bacteriology, but he humbly confesses that he does not know of any pathogenic micro-organism that would bite everybody except a Hebrew! We would like to know the name and the nature of such a bacterium or bacillus! The Hebrews were exposed to the same flies, the same germs, the same stench of the dead frogs, the same epidemic that was consequent upon this chain of events, unless Moses vaccinated or inoculated them all, some three and a half millions in number. Truly the natural explanations of the supernatural cause reason to totter on her throne!

But if God was at war with Imhotep, Reshpu and the gods of healing, and desired to scatter their following and to open their eyes to the folly of idol worship, we can see how He might protect His own, while smiting the followers of the false religion. In that case also, Moses would not need to be the only man in antiquity who could call up a devastating hail storm at the dictate of his own will. Moses could leave it to God to shame Reshpu and the other gods of the elements in the eyes of their devotees.

The Eighth Plague, that of the locusts, is the easiest of all to comprehend. This was a direct blow at the Egyptian conception of Providence, and a sweeping victory over all that was holy in the eyes of this idolatrous people. These ancient people ascribed the fertility of their fields and the abundance of the harvests to certain specific deities. The modern scholar establishes this fact by studying the hymns of praise and the votive records of the Egyptians. But after the hail had hammered their lovely ripening crops flat on the ground, and even while they mourned their loss, swarms of locusts descended like a cloud, and swept the land as clean of vegetation as a forest fire could have done.

To see God's purpose in this act, we need only consider the prophecy of Joel. With a fidelity to detail that arouses the admiration of the modern entomologist, this prophet of Israel portrays the devastation of the land by a swarm of locusts, as a judgment from God upon His own people. When famine and want stare men in the face, and they are beyond the hope of other aid, then they turn back to God in sorrow and in repentance. For where can men turn except to God, when the land lies barren and devastated, and famine stalks the earth?

Thus in Egypt, when God would teach an unforgettable lesson to the proud and haughty king whose impertinent comment had been, "Who is this Jehovah?", He punctuated His answer to Pharaoh's question with a swarm of locusts. It is reasonable to conclude that long after the starving Egyptians had forgotten the pangs of hunger that came inevitably on the heels of that visitation of consuming insects, the lesson of that visitation remained.

All these disasters, following one after the other, had struck telling blows at the very foundation of Egypt's religion. But a worse was to follow.

Of course they had it!

They are the people who later sang: "Jehovah is my light and my salvation."

But the songs of the Egyptians were directed to different gods entirely. Here, then, was a golden opportunity to test the might of these conflicting ideas of deity. Is Jehovah able to maintain His superiority over the hosts of the Egyptian gods? They were indeed mighty in the hearts of the people, and the contest was long and grim.

First of all to consider, there was the incomparable Thoth who had worked out the system of placing all the stars, the sun and the moon in the heavens. He had arranged also the seasons, as they had been decreed by Ra. Although inferior to Ra and to Horus, nevertheless Thoth gave light by night, and on those days that the sun was not visible. He also gave Isis the power needed to raise the dead, and to offend him was to suffer eternal loss. Remembering that the Hebrews had lived under this culture and psychology for generations, and considering that they all must have been tinctured somewhat with these beliefs, many of them must have trembled indeed when Jehovah calmly engaged in battle with Thoth! So the Lord God not only smote the god of Egypt in this part of the conflict, but He also established His personal superiority in the minds of His own despairing people. Certainly, when this plague ended, the Hebrews hastened to follow His next commands without hesitancy, even though those commands laid them in danger of the death penalty under Egyptian law.

A lesser deity, but also a powerful one who suffered grievously in loss of prestige while the darkness reigned, was the fire-goddess Sekhmet. She was the divinity of fire, and thus also of artificial light. This darkness that covered the land during this plague was called "thick" darkness, and it was so impenetrable that for three days and nights, the Egyptians stayed in bed! They saw the face of no man in those dark days and dense nights, and it is evident that artificial light was useless. Only in the houses of Israel did any light shine, but in each dwelling in Goshen the light was undimmed. So it was demonstrated in the case of Sekhmet, the lioness-headed goddess of artificial light, that she was powerless when Jehovah invaded her realm.

But like many other heathen and idolatrous people, the chief object of Egyptian worship was the sun itself. The natural mind can comprehend this, and there is a little of the Parsee in most modern men. So to the ancients the sun was a personification of beneficence and providence. The worship of the sun took many forms in Egypt, but the oldest and most general form of that worship was in the person of the god Ra, who appears in ancient records in many guises, and under many names. Perhaps the most common of these names is Amon-Ra. He was unquestionably the chief form of deity to the Egypt of Moses' generation.

As far as it can be said that the Egyptians conceived of a god-principle, this was expressed in the person of Ra. He was the creator of earth and of heaven, and of all things therein. All other gods were parts of his person, and members of his body and substance. The pantheon was headed by Ra, and after him came the gods and goddesses who were parts of his body. One was his eye, another his ear, while still another was his foot. This quaint conception was carried out for every known section of the anatomy, which the Egyptians seemed to have known fairly well.

The Tenth Plague intrudes into the sphere of the ninth. The death of the first-born was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back, as far as the Egyptian resistance to Jehovah was concerned. This is still aimed primarily at Ra, although there were notable deities other than he that suffered defeat in this last and awful skirmish. When the Children of Israel left Egypt, bribed to depart by a people who were prostrated with grief, the mourning Egyptians pressed upon them the cattle and the flocks, the gold and the jewels requested. Anything to get rid of the devotees of the awful Being who left every home in Egypt bowed in sorrow, and who had slain, as well, every particle of faith the people had in the once-powerful gods of the land of captivity!

Many centuries later, Paul the Apostle recalled all that is implied and stated here, when he wrote the ninth chapter of Romans and the seventeenth verse. Here it is stated that God dealt so with Pharaoh, that the name of God should be advertised throughout all the earth.

Is it so advertised?

One of the many questions that are frequently asked of the archeologist, and one that is most difficult to answer in a few brief words, concerns the source of his material. There is a sort of mystery that hovers over this modern calling which intrigues the fancy of the average layman. When an archeologist begins to dig in some barren waste of sand and comes upon a buried city that has been missing from the history of men for multiplied centuries, it impresses the casual observer as magic of the blackest kind. There is, however, nothing supernatural or uncommon about these discoveries, although the element of chance does enter in to a minor extent. Some of the greatest and most prolific fields we personally have investigated were brought to our attention when the plow of a farmer cast up a human skull and focussed attention upon that particular field. Generally, however, the sources of archeology are uncovered by hard, patient, painstaking labor.

When an able prospector starts out in his search for gold, he is guided by certain known factors that have been derived from the experience of generations. Panning his way up a stream-bed, the keen-eyed hunter of fortune tests every spot that previous experience had taught him might be profitable. He may labor at one thousand barren sites before he strikes gold. If he is in a mountainous country and the placer deposits are not rich enough to pay him to tarry on the spot where the first discovery was made, he will work his way on up the stream, testing site after site for increasing values. If the show of color in his pan suddenly ceases, he knows that he has passed the sources of these wandering fragments. He then goes back to the last point where he found traces of gold and then begins to search the side canyons and branch streams that lead into the main channel. In this way he traces his path step by step to the ledge from which the gold originally came. After laboring weary months, or even years, with heart-breaking disappointment and grim, hard work, if he is fortunate he announces a discovery. The thoughtless immediately credit his good fortune to the goddess of luck and wonder why they also could not be blessed that way.

This illustration is an exact picture of the manner in which archeologists go about their business. There are certain sites that experience has taught us should be profitable to investigate. The region is carefully combed for surface indications. These may be such things as shards of pottery, arrowheads, fragmentary bones, or any of the ordinary debris that indicates a site of human habitation or burial. When the surface indications suggest the probability of a real find, then the digging commences. Most of our great discoveries are made only after months, and even years, of painstaking survey. These surveys must be made by men who are expert in the interpretation of surface indications and fragmentary evidences. Thus it is at once apparent that there is really nothing supernatural or magical about this sober craft; it is scientific in its procedure. There is no "doodle-bug" for archeology such as is sometimes used by those who are found around the fringe of geology.

It must be remembered that the orientals differed greatly in their building methods from the occidentals. It is customary among us to excavate to bed rock before we lay the foundation for a building. The orientals, however, began to build right on the surface of any site that suited their fancy. For instance, a wandering tribe of nomads desiring to settle either temporarily or permanently, would pick out a hill that was more easily defended than a level site would be. Upon its crest, they built their houses and generally fenced the scene for the purposes of defense. Within these fortifying walls they dwelt in more or less security until they became rich enough to be robbed. It would not be long, however, under the brutal law of might that prevailed in those ancient days, before some marauding band would overrun that site with fire and sword. The walls would be breached or cast down and the inhabitants put to sword or carried away into slavery. Usually fire would sweep the homes of this once contented people and their memory would soon be forgotten.

To one who has seen the sand storms of the East, the rest of the story is self-evident. Even in our own times and in our own land, we have seen what can happen when drought and wind begin to move the surface of a country and make the efforts of man fruitless and unavailing. When men lived in these sites of antiquity and kept the encroaching sands swept and shoveled out, they were able to maintain their position of security. As soon, however, as the site was deserted, the sand would begin to drift over the deserted ruins. In a very few years the remains of the ruined city would be lost from the sight of men. Perhaps a century or two would pass by, during which this abandoned region would be devoid of habitation.

Plate 6

Plate 7

Then another company of people looking for a permanent dwelling place would chance upon this hill. Finding it suited to their requirements they would immediately start building upon the surface. With no knowledge whatever that a previous group of people had made this hill their habitation, the new dwellings and walls would rise high upon the covered ruins of the earlier period. Within a comparatively short time they also would be the victims of some wandering conqueror, and once again the wrecked habitations of men would be repossessed by the drifting sands of the desert. It is not uncommon that in the course of a thousand years such an experience would be repeated from three or four to a dozen times upon the same site.

In such a recovery the common life of the people of antiquity is revealed in amazing detail. We learn their customs of living, something of their arts and crafts and their manner of labor. Their knowledge of architecture is clearly portrayed through such ruins as remain, and the general picture of the incidental events that made up their living is clearly developed as the work proceeds.

These sites yield many types of material. In establishing chronology, the most important of all of these is probably the pottery. There is no age of men so ancient that it does not yield proof of human ability in the ceramic art. Without aluminum cooking utensils or iron skillets, the folk of antiquity depended upon clay for the vessels of their habitation. Dishes, pots, jars, and utensils of a thousand usages were all made of this common substance. Before the invention of paper, clay was also the common material for preserving written records. As each race of people had its own peculiarities in the use of clay, the pottery that is found on a given site is one of the finest indications of a date factor that the site can contain.

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