When All Is Not All

Number 5 of 17 in the *Twilight Zone* series:

by Farrell Till

To the Twilight-Zone mind of the Christian fundamentalist, nothing in the Bible is too absurd to believe. Twilight Zonery at its absurdest is exemplified in the way that Bible fundamentalists insist that the story of the Egyptian plagues is literally true in all of its details.  The plagues began when Yahweh commanded Moses to have Aaron stretch his staff over "the waters of Egypt" (Ex. 7:19) to change them into blood. The transformation was to include water that was in the rivers, streams, pools, ponds, and even vessels of wood and stone. When Moses and Aaron did so, "all the waters that were in the river were turned to blood" (v:20), and the blood, as Yahweh had decreed, was "throughout all the land of Egypt" (v:21).

"Well, why not?" Christian fundamentalists will demand. If we concede the existence of an omnipotent God for whom Moses and Aaron were acting as emissaries, the performance of a deed like this would have been rather insignificant compared to, say, the creation of the world. Perhaps so, but the writer of this little yarn so blundered in the way he told the story that, even with that concession, rational thinkers will have no difficulty seeing that it is pure fantasy. Whoever wrote it clearly intended to present it from the very beginning as a contest between the powers of Pharaoh's magicians and the power of Yahweh acting through Moses and Aaron. In a display of power to Pharaoh before the plagues themselves actually began, Aaron cast his rod down, and it became a serpent (Ex. 7:10). Not at all impressed with the demonstration, Pharaoh called for his magicians, who "did in like manner with their enchantments" (v:11). They cast their rods down, and they too became serpents.  Aaron's serpent, however, came to the rescue by swallowing the magicians' serpents [rods], presumably demonstrating that the power of Yahweh was superior to the power of the magicians (v:12).

The writer's apparent strategy, then, was to present the story as a tit-for-tat contest between the magicians of Egypt and the power of Yahweh. Whatever Moses and Aaron would do, the writer would have the magicians duplicate until finally they would have to give up and admit that Yahweh's power was greater than theirs, as they did during the plague of lice (8:8-19). On the surface, it seems like a good idea, but it resulted in a serious blunder when the writer applied the strategy to the plague of blood and had the magicians do "in like manner with their enchantments" (7:22). Aaron had changed all of the water throughout all the land of Egypt into blood (7:20-21). As previously noted, all of the water included the water that was in rivers, streams, pools, ponds, and even vessels of wood and stone (v:19). So the blunder is rather obvious. If all of the water throughout all the land of Egypt was changed into blood, even including small quantities stored in vessels of wood and stone, how could the magicians have possibly done "in like manner with their enchantments"?  If all of the water in Egypt had already been changed into blood, there would have been no water for them to work with.

This was something that the Exodus writer apparently didn't consider. It was one thing for him to have Pharaoh's magicians duplicate Aaron's feat of changing his rod into a serpent, because the magicians themselves had rods to use their enchantments on. If, however, the story had said that Aaron had changed all of the rods in Egypt into serpents, it then would have been impossible for the magicians to duplicate the feat. When Aaron brought the plague of frogs onto the land of Egypt, the magicians again "did in like manner with their enchantments" (8:7). The text does not say, however, that Aaron had brought forth all the frogs in all the land of Egypt. If it had, then the magicians couldn't possibly have duplicated the feat, because there would have been no more frogs in Egypt for the magicians to call forth. Obviously, then, the writer's zeal to magnify the power of Yahweh led him to excess in proclaiming the thoroughness of the plague of blood, an excess that clearly shows that at least this part of the story could not have happened as he recorded it. If this part of the story couldn't have happened as claimed, then we are entitled to wonder if any of it happened.

In the Twilight Zone of biblical fundamentalism, the faithful never allow problems like this one to get in their way of believing the absurd, so, of course, they have an "explanation" of the problem. They will simply claim that all doesn't always mean literally all. In support of their position, they will cite passages like Matthew 3:5, where the word all was obviously used in a figurative sense to mean many or most. That  may well be true, but there is no suggestion at all of figurative intent in this account of the first plague or any of the others for that matter. In fact, the writer seemed to go out of his way to stress the thoroughness and magnitude of the plagues. Twice he said that all the water "throughout all the land of Egypt" was changed into blood (7:19-21). In describing the other plagues, he declared that all the borders of Egypt were infested with frogs (8:2), that "all the dust of the earth became lice throughout all the land of Egypt (8:17), that all the land of Egypt" was corrupted by swarms of flies (8:24), that all the livestock of Egypt died of murrain (9:6), and so on through all of the plagues. The writer's obvious intention was to proclaim the immensity and totality of the plagues, so unless all meant all when the writer used it, the superlatives he used to describe the scope of the plagues become just so much meaningless gibberish.

Regrettably, to the mind trapped in the Twilight Zone of biblical fundamentalism, meaningless gibberish too often becomes the foundation of abiding faith.