One of the consistent challenges at Passover is bringing new perspectives to the texts and rituals that can too easily become rote. With the festival approaching, Steven Weitzman’s new book, “Disasters of Biblical Proportions: The Ten Plagues Then, Now, and at the End of the World,” is particularly welcome.
Our customary recitation of the 10 plagues at the seder table is notable for its minimalism. The lack of detail in the presentation of the plagues in the Book of Exodus makes them ripe for expansion and exploration.
Weitzman, who directs the Katz Center of Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, takes an unconventional approach. Rather than simply offering a close reading of the Biblical text and its rabbinic interpretation, he ventures widely and explores how the plagues have been understood by Jews, Christians and Muslims over the centuries.
The book, published in February, devotes a chapter to each plague, with Weitzman selecting something “odd or puzzling” in the text to examine.
For the fourth plague, he focuses not on the disastrous invasion of flies but on the fact that the Israelites are protected by where they live: Goshen. This region in Egypt appears in Exodus only in connection with the plagues: “I will set apart in that day the land of Goshen, where my people are stationed, so that no swarm of flies will be there…”
Weitzman examines how Goshen is at once a land populated by slaves and a haven of sorts from the plague. “If Egypt is a symbol of oppression and brutality, and Canaan of freedom and independence,” he writes. “Goshen represented something in between, a realm situated within the heart of an oppressive landscape that nonetheless offered room to act with a measure of autonomy.”
I was particularly moved by his consideration of how African Americans regarded Goshen. Weitzman finds that while Egypt and Canaan carried enormous symbolic power in African American thought and expression, the idea of Goshen as a haven within the world of enslavement did not gain traction at first — perhaps because no corresponding haven existed for Black people in the United States during slavery. In 1900, however, Black essayist Kelly Miller wrote “The Modern Land of Goshen,” calling for Black people to work toward economic self-dependence.
Dozens of self-governed Black towns emerged in the U.S. in the aftermath of the Civil War, offering some degree of insulation from the surrounding racism. One such place was Eatonville, Florida, where author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston was raised. Her book “Moses: Man of the Mountain,” which fictionalizes the Exodus story, offers a vision of Goshen as a sort of prison camp. But it was one where, as Weitzman puts it, “the oppressed find ways to evade the notice of their taskmasters and express themselves freely.”
The author approaches the fifth plague of cattle disease by asking whether attention was paid to the suffering of the animals themselves.
He finds that early Jewish and Christian interpreters appeared unbothered by the afflicted cattle, viewed as “mere implements” of God’s designs. Christian sermons from the 17th century onward, however, showed increased concern about animal welfare, and real-world recurrences of widespread cattle disease kept it in public consciousness.
Weitzman traces a line from this emerging empathy to new language in some contemporary haggadahs, in which “God‘s killing of animals during the exodus began to be experienced as a moral embarrassment by Jewish animal rights activists, vegetarians, and vegans.“
In discussing the sixth plague, Weitzman focuses not on the boils, but on the “shift that Exodus registers from a pharaoh who hardens his own heart to a pharaoh whose heart is hardened by God.” This is familiar territory to those who have studied Jewish commentary on Exodus, but I particularly appreciated Weitzman’s discussion of Christian thought.
Paul the apostle, writing in the Epistle to the Romans, took a deterministic approach, asserting that God created Pharaoh to be hardhearted. This view met resistance early on, with the third-century scholar Origen arguing that God endowed people with free will and that human beings always have choices concerning their behavior.
Tracing a path through Augustine, Erasmus, Luther and other thinkers, Weitzman notes that “Christians will turn again and again to the story of Pharaoh’s hardened heart to try to work out whether humans have self-determining power in a world controlled by an all-powerful and all-knowing God.“
The book’s afterword reveals that it was inspired by the feelings Weitzman experienced at the first seder during the pandemic lockdown, with the plagues taking on a sudden immediacy. Other chapters convey the sense that the plagues remain relevant today, in a world marked by war, disease and environmental catastrophe.
For those interested in the Bible’s enduring influence or seeking fresh insight before this year’s seder, the book offers a challenging and satisfying journey.