Passover in the Time of Pandemic
April 2020 | Vol. 8.4
By Alex Joffe
At the Passover Seder Jews recount the story of the Exodus. The dramatic core is the Ten Plagues sent by God to afflict the Egyptians and that motivate Pharaoh to free the Israelite slaves who then begin their journey to Canaan. The plagues are a dividing line between two epochs.
The Tenth Plague, full-page miniature, from the Hagadah for Passover (the ‘Sister Haggadah’,) ca. 1325-1374 CE). British Library.
But the literal meaning of the Hebrew word for plagues, מכות, blows or lashes, captures more viscerally the effect of these divinely created phenomena. Though from a pre-scientific world, the word מכות–blows– has considerable relevance for today. So, too, does an examination of pandemics in the past, including in the ancient Near East.
Global pandemics such as that being experienced today are not uncommon, but they typically occurred with a frequency outside individual perception. Much attention has suddenly been focused on the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1920 that killed at least 100 million people worldwide, including almost 700,000 in the US. Less has been said about the Asian Flu that emerged in China in the winter of 1957 and which reached the US that summer. At least a million people died, some 116,000 in the US. For whatever reason, the Swine Flu pandemic of 2009 is barely remembered by most people, perhaps because of its low mortality rate.
There are many contrasts between those three events, not least the speed of their spread. The impact of the Spanish Flu played out catastrophically over three years; today, in a span of perhaps three months, the coronavirus that originated in China has spread across the entire world. Globalization, that is to say the spread of trade and tourism, personal movement and mass migration, individual processes that once took years now take days or even hours.
The speed and scale of the modern world were made possible by technology. In 1903 Orville Wright flew 120 feet at a speed of 6.8 miles per hours. The de Havilland Comet, which seated 36, inaugurated the Jet Age in 1952 and had a top speed of 500 miles per hour. The Boeing 747 entered service in 1969, seats between 400 and 600, and can fly 9,200 miles.
Over 1550 were built. In a mere 66 years space and time were collapsed in ways that we take for granted, and in ways that ancient societies could scarcely imagine.
But the 1918 virus – novel influenza A or H1N1 – was the ancestor of most of the 20th century’s influenza pandemics, all the way to 2009s. Though beyond the individual experience, it was in effect a single, long event.
Mortality Associated with Influenza Pandemics and Selected Seasonal Epidemic Events, 1918–2009. (David M. Morens, M.D., Jeffery K. Taubenberger, M.D., Ph.D., and Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., The Persistent Legacy of the 1918 Influenza Virus, N Engl J Med 2009; 361:225-229.)
In contrast, novel coronaviruses such as SARS, which originated in China in 2002, MERS, which spread throughout the Middle East in 2012, and now COVID-19, were only discovered in the late 1960s. There are always dividing lines between epochs, some long, others short, but they always overlap.
Ancient pandemics were common, initiating changes that played out in the short and long term. One the most famous occurred in Athens in 430 BCE. As reported by Thucydides, Sparta and Corinth had led the Peloponnesian League against the Athenian Empire, which dominated the Aegean. Forced from their hinterlands, Athenians gathered in the city linked only to the sea by the ‘Long Walls.’
Map of Athens’ “Long Walls” to Piraeus. A General History of Greece by G.W. Cox, p. 303. British Library. Public Domain.
A plague, perhaps typhoid or typhus, said to have come from Africa, was set loose and some 30,000 Athenians died, including their leader, Pericles.
His successors, the demagogue Cleon and the strategist Demosthenes, routed the Spartans and their allies leading to the Peace of Nicias in 421 BCE. But then in 415 BCE, prompted by greed, overconfidence and intrigue, Athens invaded Syracuse. The expedition failed, thanks in part to a plague, and despite a later series of victories, the Athenian Empire was soon destroyed.
Other plagues with similar causes, daily life and miscalculation alike, gave microbes from afar the chance to run riot and draw more lines in history. The Plague of Justinian in 541-542 CE was an actual bubonic plague caused by Yersinia pestis, the anaerobic bacterium carried by fleas attached to rats.
Modern DNA analysis suggests that merchants’ ships arriving at Constantinople, the center of the Byzantine Empire, carried a bacterium whose origins were in northwest China. The Byzantines were weakened, and they then struggled against the Goths and the Lombards. This weakness facilitated the rise of the Anglo-Saxons and later the Arabs.
But disease is as old as the world. Archaeological evidence indicates that tuberculosis originated at least 75,000 years ago. Caused by an environmental bacterium, the disease was transferred among nomadic hunter-gatherers huddled together before a fire. The ‘modern’ version of the disease emerged around 45,000 years ago, whereupon it ravaged more hunter-gatherers. Beginning some 10,000 years ago their village and urban descendants then spread two lineages of the disease from the Near East to Europe and Asia.
Skeletons of a Neolithic woman and child with tuberculosis from the submerged cemetery of Atlit Yam, Israel. Photo courtesy of Tel Aviv University.
The results were etched into human bones, tissue, and DNA.The remarkable thing is that humanity was not eradicated, despite the deaths of a least a billion people in the past two centuries alone.
Larger human populations and complex life invariably produced worse health but beyond the predictable problems of sanitation and infectious disease there were also unlikely vectors. The coronavirus appears to have originated in a bat population, transferred to humans via Wuhan’s notorious ‘wet market.’ There are other animal diseases which find their way to us, such as zoonotic tuberculosis, caused by Mycobacterium bovis, which is found in cows and other bovines. This close 10,000-year-long relationship between human and animal continues to cause over 15,000 deaths a year.
Even more remarkably, the same strain of zoonotic tuberculosis that originated in Africa at least 6,000 years ago also appeared in humans in Peru around 1,000 years ago, having possibly been carried by seals and sea lions from one continent to the other. The Old World and the New World were globalized long before humans themselves were in direct contact, confusing further our sense of boundaries and epochs.
Ancient civilizations were painfully aware of disease. Medical texts from Mesopotamia and Egypt record a variety of ailments small and large, from headaches to smallpox, and their treatment, mostly magical. But there were at least three types of medical specialist in ancient Egypt, physician, bite expert, and plague expert, which speaks to the common types of afflictions. Plague itself may have reached ancient Egypt from India by the second millennium BCE via exceedingly long distance trade. Hittite sources also record that Egyptian prisoners taken in battle during the 19th Dynasty brought a plague to their captors, which possibly even killed the king, Suppiluliuma and his eldest son. “What is this, o gods, that you have done? A plague you have let into the land. The Land of Hatti, all of it, is dying,” one text states.
Tablet of Hittite plague prayers of King Mursili II. Photo by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), CC By-SA 3.0.
The sources of contagion and their results were not unlike our own. Like us, Near Eastern civilizations correlated war with disease. “On the one hand it is afflicted with a plague,” complained the Hittites to a god regarding their ravaged land, “on the other hand it is afflicted with hostility.” The very nature of ancient pantheons was shaped by these concerns, in which correlation and causation were one. The Akkadian warrior god Erra brought destruction by means of warfare and resulting pestilence, and was in turn identified with the Babylonian Nergal as well with as the West Semitic deity Resheph, who was then adopted by Egyptians.
Addressing the gods with complaints and pleas is a familiar tone. Ancient writers, mostly priests and royalty, were also aware of the ability of disease, writ large, to draw lines.
In 721 BCE, after decades of Assyrian campaigns to the region, Sargon II destroyed the Israelite capital of Samaria and the ten northern tribes were led into captivity. Mindful of the Israelites’ transgressions, King Hezekiah “abolished the shrines and smashed the pillars and cut down the sacred post. He also broke into pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until that time the Israelites had been offering sacrifices to it” (2 Kings 19).
Then in 701 BCE, Sargon’s son Sennacherib invaded Judah and besieged a number of cities. Hezekiah paid an extraordinary tribute but Jerusalem was nevertheless besieged. But according to the prophet Isaiah (37:36) “an angel of the LORD went out and struck down one hundred and eighty-five thousand in the Assyrian camp, and the following morning they were all dead corpses.” Remarkably, Sennacherib’s own account refers to the destruction of many other cities but not Jerusalem. Whether through divine intervention, disease, or as Herodotus described, “a multitude of field-mice, which devoured all the quivers and bow-strings of the enemy,” Jerusalem was spared. Hezekiah’s religious reforms, whether in anticipation or reaction to the Assyrian threat, changed the course of Judean religion and its successors.
Prism with inscriptions listing the campaigns of Sennacherib, 691 BCE. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
Without a scientific viewpoint about causality humans continued to thoughtlessly cause their own pandemics until recently. It was not until 1854 that a London physician, Dr. John Snow, sensed that the source of the cholera raging through his parish was a contaminated well and demanded that the handle of the public pump be removed. Today the pump handle may be on the other side of the planet. Lines may be erased without our knowing.
The Israelites were instructed by God to paint the blood of sacrificial lambs on the doorposts and lintels of their homes, for “when I see the blood I will pass over you, so that no plague will destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.” This was successful, but today we have no such recourse and are reduced to simple expedients like hand washing and ‘social distancing,’ the latter behavior being contrary to our very nature as gregarious animals. The lines we draw between one another, the distances we are forced to establish even with loved ones in life, and even in death and mourning, make us reexamine essential features of our humanity. Perhaps there are lines that deserve to be erased.
Passover speaks to liberation, but while today we all fear the מכות, the Biblical story was necessarily one sided. And thus, sensitive to the ethical conundrum of the Ten Plagues – that liberation for some entailed death for others – the Talmud comments that “At that time the ministering angels desired to recite a song before the Holy One, Blessed be He. The Holy One, Blessed be He, said to them: My handiwork, the Egyptians, are drowning in the sea, and you are reciting a song before Me?” Individual survival, however welcome, cannot obscure our inescapable commonality.
We therefore endure the blows and strive to achieve some measure of enlightenment for the new epoch dawning.
How to cite this article:
Joffe, A. 2020. “Passover in the Time of Pandemic”, The Ancient Near East Today 8.4. Accessed at: https://anetoday.org/passover-pandemic/.
Want to learn more?
From Monolatry to Monotheism: The Changing Face of the Biblical Pantheon
What is a God in the Hebrew Bible? Part 2: Characteristics and Hierarchy
Post a comment