Biblical Plagues really happened, but not by God, say scientists
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The ten plagues that the Bible mentions affected ancient Egypt may have occurred after all, but due to natural causes and not by the direct intervention of a god helping the flight of an enslaved people, according to researchers.
A shift in climate patterns may have caused a dry period that would have turned the Nile into a slow moving body of waters. Dr Stephan Pflugmacher, a biologist at the Leibniz Institute for Water Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin, believes these conditions are perfect for the proliferation of a bacterium known as Burgundy Blood algae, which would have stained the Nile waters red.
This event in itself would have let to the frogs, lice and flies plagues, which in turn caused diseases that decimated livestock and people.
The volcanic eruption that wiped out the island of Thera south of Greece have been previously proposed as the explanation for the hail storms that blocked out the sunlight for three days. Darkness and humidity would have fostered the arrival of the locusts.
A previous article in Egypt Then and Now mentions the existence and use in ancient Egypt of pumice, a volcanic rock originally from Thera.
The final plague, that of the death of the first born, may have been caused by a fatal fungus that infected the grain that was normally picked by the eldest child in the family.
According to researchers, these events may have happened during the reign of Ramses the Great in the area of his capital city of Pi-Ramese, on the Nile delta.
The scientific explanations for the Biblical plagues will be outlined in a new TV series to be broadcast on the National Geographical Channel on Easter Sunday.
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