Nehar Deah

Vaera

About “The Songs of the Plague of Egypt” by Natan Alterman

“The Songs of the Plagues of Egypt” were written and published during the Second World War (1944) and it is difficult not to hear the echoes of this war between their verses. Despite this, these are not poems about world war or about the destruction of European Jewry. Alterman turns the biblical story of the plagues of Egypt into a parable of destruction, which descends as punishment upon communities and kingdoms. Na-Amon, the Egyptian city in the poem, becomes a universal truth, which repeats itself over and over throughout history; it is the law of reward and punishment which come as a result of transgression. The wild beasts and the cattle disease “go forth to the world as a friend to present to them the vision of recompense”.

Alterman takes the story of the plagues out of its biblical context and alters its meaning: what was originally a series of divine “signs” directed at Pharaoh and the magicians of Egypt becomes an anatomy of destruction wherever it occurs. The plagues, which come one after the other in the Torah, become a sequence with a constant regularity, in which destruction develops step after step, to its climax in the plague of the firstborn.

“The Songs of the Plagues of Egypt” are created in a strictly formed mould: ten poems surrounded by an introductory poem (“On the way to Na-Amon”) and a concluding poem (“Ayyelet”). Each one of the poems of the plagues is constructed of six square verses and each one is cut at the same point – the end of the third verse, with the line “‘My father’, calls the son. ‘My firstborn’, answers the father”. At this point each poem becomes a tense dialogue between father and son about the plague which has descended upon the city.

The major introductory poem, made up of 8 lines, places the destruction within the never ending chain of cycles which make up history and he places the cycle of evil encompassing the universe and the divine spark within man; the treachery of the rulers in difficult times and mass psychology always blaming ministers and leaders and absolving itself of the responsibility. The introductory poem does not itself absolve even the poets and thinkers. However the introductory poem is also meant to point to another fundamental, in which lies the focus of the entire poem: the spark of love between people at a time of crisis and destruction. This spark is included in the poem in the characters of the father and his firstborn son. These figures, which appear repeatedly throughout the poem, are nonetheless taken from the tenth plague of the Torah – “And every firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sits upon his throne until the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the millstone” (Shemot 11:5), but Alterman emphasizes them to the extent that he turns them into an entity which stands in opposition – against the forces of destruction and corruption. Destruction does eventually take their lives, but it cannot corrupt their spirit and cannot touch their love. The cries of the mourning father are the “immortal flower”, an eternally human thing no less eternal than the plague of destruction. It is a symbol of that human facet that is not of the rulership or of the rabble; it is wholly dedicated to others and to closeness between man and his fellow man.

This “immortal flower” of human love, that sprouts in all it’s glory from the mournful picture of the son’s death in the tenth poem, reveals the depths of the alteration and even contradiction, between “The Songs of the Plagues of Egypt” and the Egyptian plagues as told of in the Torah. In the poems, the plagues are not divine “signs” coming to destroy “primitive” idolatry, but rather they are waves of destruction and corruption which descend upon humanity, from the force of that humanity, and they are never “learnt from history”; it arises and is again destroyed, again and again, from the strength of the forces of construction and destruction which are part of it. More than this: the plagues of Egypt are described from “outside” – from a viewpoint which supports the victory of the one God an the rejoicing over the misfortune of the Egyptians, while Alterman’s poems (excluding the introduction) are written from a perspective which stands within the plague ridden city, and they build, using an supernormal descriptive and expressive strength, the sense of panic, shock and loss of direction of the people who are trapped within it. The father, who knows the course of the destruction, is also aware of the impending death of his son and is torn between refuge and panic and describes what is occurring from a viewpoint which expresses simultaneously calm and extreme terror.

Alterman, in a way, has spread the plague of the firstborn across all the plagues, not only in that he interwove the chapters of the dialogue between father and son into the poems of each plague, but also in that he altered its viewpoint and placed everyone within the span of human experience. Alterman also fundamentally changed the literal meaning of the plagues. While the biblical plagues are described as various physical disasters, the Altermanic plagues are described as complex situations which range between external disaster and the mental states of the society and the individual. “Blood”, for example, is not necessarily water from a well or river which has turned to blood, but rather the color red which floods everything – with conflagration and carnage, the color of human terror. The “frog” is not necessarily the physical creature, but rather a mixed multitude of low and clinging creatures which rise up from their hiding places and become leaders, like rabble. The “wild beasts” are not merely animals, but are madness and terror which grip an entire civilization. The “cattle disease” is a sickness, but it is much more than this: it is the happiness and debauchery which attacks a weary society, gripped with fear and despondency, as in the days of the “Black Plague” and this also washes over the father and son. The “boils” are shame, the beginnings of humanity’s awareness of the damage and sin. The “hail” is in fact a natural disaster. Here Alterman strays from his interpretive style, which abstracts the “plagues” and describes an actual natural disaster which is a combination of hail, thunder and storm of Pompeii. In contrast the “locusts” are completely abstract: it is the stage of man losing his humanity. The “darkness” is nothingness, the total destruction and the incontrovertible law that is a constant part of it – the law of destruction that lies beneath the construction: “All is completed, Amon. Knowingly. With wisdom”. Here, at the stage of “darkness”, the plague of the firstborn already takes place. The boy, his face suddenly pale, calls out: “My father, where is father. My bed is darkness”. And the father answers him in a verse which is a précis of the metaphysical strength of man’s love: “My firstborn, my firstborn son, darkness will not divide us, because father and son are linked by the tangles of darkness”. These “tangles of darkness” of man’s love become the exclusive strength present in this poem, “the plague of the firstborn”, and therefore it is no longer a “plague” at all, but rather a test of the superhuman strength of man.

The ten plagues are, therefore, stages of disaster on one hand, and stages of rehabilitation on the other hand – stages of wisdom and internalizing and of knowledge about the constant process of destruction. The ceremonial splendor of the plague of the firstborn, grave and penetrating, yet also tranquil and illuminated, is the strange spectacle of this stage of awareness, the development of which Alterman sketches throughout the poem.

“Ayyelet”, the concluding poem of “The Songs of the Plagues of Egypt”, is dedicated to Ayyelet HaShachar (the last star seen before dawn), which combines the principle of the natural renewal of humanity as a whole, which is the reason for the young girl in the raspberry colored suit (= blood). It is the smile which expresses maturity and acceptance and the strength to deal with the pain and the feelings to their greatest extent. This smile becomes, in Alterman’s hands, a force of nature which equal to every plague of Egypt.

“The Songs of the Plagues of Egypt” grasp distant extremes: the law of disaster which is buried in human society and the law of life which is bound up with it and on the other side, man’s ability to tolerate suffering and the creative force of human feelings.

Dr Ariel Hirschfeld
Department of Hebrew Literature

Biblical Literature – How many plague struck Egypt?

If the question will be posed: with how many plagues were the Egyptians struck? The person questioned is likely to be insulted, as every girl and boy knows the answer as given in the Torah – ten plagues (Shemot 7-11). However, a different conception arises from historical psalms within the Book of Psalms, which enumerate the plagues of Egypt (78:44-51; 105:28-36). In these two psalms, the number of plagues is seven, which, like the number ten, is also a number of perfection.

In Psalm 78, which depicts the lack of gratitude of the children of Israel for the benevolence of its God, the plagues are mentioned as part of this benevolence. The plagues are divided into three sets and the single seventh plague. The first 2 plagues, blood and wild beasts-frogs (verses 44-45), focus on eating and drinking: the first plague caused the Egyptians not to be able to drink (“And he turned their rivers into blood; and their fluids, that they could not drink”), while the second plague is about Egyptians being eaten by the wild beasts (“And he sent among them wild beasts and they devoured them”). The connection of the next two plagues, locusts and hail, is closer: both of these plagues cause destruction to crops. Each plague mentions twice that crops were: destroyed. In the plague of locusts: “He gave their increase to the destroying locust, and their labor unto the swarming locust”, and in the plague of hail the poet even identifies the crops destroyed with specific types of plants: “And he killed with hail their vines and their sycamore tree with frost”. The third set (verses 48-50) deals with two plagues of pestilence, one in animals and the other in man. This set opens with the words “and he gave them over to pestilence” (this is the wording of the Greek translation, the Septuagint, of the verse!) and ends with the words “to the pestilence he gave them over”, which creates a fitting literary framework for these plagues. The pestilence in man, which is mentioned at the end of the third set, serves as an appropriate point to move on to the climactic plague, the seventh, the plague of death which strikes “every firstborn in Egypt” (verse 51).

Psalm 105 tells of the miracles Hashem performs for his nation, from the times of the forefathers and up till the bequeathing of the land to the children of Israel. These miracles are meant to awaken the nation to keeping the commandments (verse 45) and among them are mentioned seven plagues which awakened the Egyptians to send Israel out of their land. Here too the plagues are divided into 3 sets and a climactic plague, the seventh. The first set of plagues (verses 28-29) describes upheavals in nature: the overturning of light by darkness and the turning of water into blood. The next set (verses 30-31) deal with creatures which bother the Egyptians, without causing any real damage: “Their land teemed with frogs, in the chambers of their kings, he spoke, and there came swarms of gnats and lice in all their borders”. In the third set (verses 32-35) there is a turning point and intensification. The damage caused by the locusts and the hail is obvious and the ravages caused to the crops by these two plagues are severe: “He gave them hail for rain, flaming fire in their land. He smote their vines and their fig trees and broke the trees of their borders. He spoke, and the swarming locusts came and uncountable hopping locusts and they ate all the grasses in their land and ate the fruit of their soil”. The intensification in the third set is also expressed in the length of the description, which is as long as the first two sets put together. The worst of the damage is, of course, in the climactic plague, the seventh, the plague of the firstborn (“and he smote every firstborn in their land” [verse 36]). The plague of the firstborn closes the three enumerations of the plagues in the Bible, which are different in terms of the number and order and of the plagues – ten plagues in the Torah and seven plagues in the two psalms.

The Haggadah of Pessach (Passover) – The Plagues of Egypt and the Seder Night

In the text that lies at the center of the Seder night, the “Haggadah of Pessach”, the plagues are, as expected, mentioned a number of times. They are first mentioned in the section called Maggid (retelling), in the context of the Midrash on the verses in Devarim 26:5-8 (which begin with the words “My father was a wandering Aramean and he went down to Egypt”), verses which retell the exodus from Egypt in a very concise format. After the Midrash discusses the children of Israel going down to Egypt, their suffering in that land and their prayers to Hashem, it moves on to talk of the redemption, in verse 8: “And the Hashem brought us forth out of Egypt with a mighty hand and with an outstretched arm and with great terror and with signs and with wonders”. The plagues are mentioned in the interpretation of this verse. In the beginning it is stressed (from “And the Hashem brought us forth out of Egypt”) that Hashem himself is the redeemer and as a proof, the verse “For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night and I will strike every firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast…” (Shemot 12:12) is brought, a verse which mentions the plague of the firstborn. As a result of this, the commentaries on this verse mention another two plagues: “with a mighty hand” – this is the pestilence (as it is written in the warning before this plague “Behold, the hand of the Hashem is upon thy cattle” [Shemot 9:3]), “and with wonders” – this is the blood (as it is written in the Book of Yoel: “And I gave wonders in the heavens and the earth, blood and fire and pillars of smoke” [3:3]). Mentioning only two plagues, the pestilence and the blood, comes obviously, from the words “hand” and “wonders” in the verse in the Book of Devarim, which can be connected to other verses through the means of the Midrash.

Despite this, immediately afterwards this verse is interpreted a second time and this time we find all ten plagues in the commentary, but without any of their details. Three of the expressions in the verse have two words each (“strong hand”, “outstretched arm”, “great terror”) and here we have a hint to six plagues. The next 2 words are in plural (“signs”, “wonders”) and here we have another four plagues, in light of the rule that says that a word in plural form means at least two (in the words of the sages: “the minimum of many – two).

Only now are all the plagues enumerated explicitly consecutively and after them a sentence “Rabbi Yehuda gave them signs (a mnemonic): Detzach Adash Beachav”. Many a quill has been worn out trying to understand why Rabbi Yehuda needed these acronyms (DeTZaCh = Dam [blood], Tzephardea [frog], Cinim [lice], etc) and it seems that it is likely a mnemonic device used to remember the order of the plagues. An acronym like this (known as notarikon) is a common occurrence in the literature of the sages, which was transmitted and learnt orally, but is it possible to suggest that Rabbi Yehuda wishes, through the learning of this acronym, to inculcate into his students and listeners to his lessons, the numbers of plagues mentioned in the Torah in contrast to that which is seen in the Psalms (see above).

(As an aside: we make note of the fact that there is a custom on the Seder night to drip from the glass drops of wine when mentioning “blood and fire and pillars of smoke”, the ten plagues and Rabbi Yehuda’s acronym. This custom is known from Ashkenaz (Germany) and is first mentioned in a Haggadah which was printed in 1527. Many reasons have been given for this custom, but it there has not yet been an explanation that satisfies everyone.)