What could the 10 plagues in the bible have been? Assuming they actually happened, they could all have rational explanations. However, the evidence shows that they were not a real event.
The ten plagues appear in the Book of Exodus in the Old Testament. The story is that the Israelites were enslaved by the Egyptians and Moses asked the pharaoh to free them. When he didn’t, the god of the Israelites brought ten plagues down on the Egyptians until the Pharaoh capitulated and let the Israelites go free. Which pharaoh it was is never said and what would have happened if he hadn’t given in on the tenth plague is also not said. These are the plagues in order. Turning water to blood. Frogs. Lice or gnats. Wild animals or flies. Pestilence of livestock. Boils. Thunderstorm of hail and fire. Locusts. Three days of darkness. Death of the firstborn son.
The first problem with any kind of event like this is working out if it actually happened. The bible is the only source of reference for Moses and for these plagues. It also doesn’t specify which pharaoh. With many cultures this can be put down to a lack of records, but that is not true with the ancient Egyptians because they kept meticulous records of their history and of so many other things. Before we look at what caused the plagues, we should look at the historicity of Moses, Israelites being in Egypt, Egyptian slave revolts, and the mention of plagues.
There are no mentions outside the bible of someone called Moses, or someone who did what Moses is claimed to have done. As with many other characters in the bible, he could have been a myth, or he could have been a legend based off a real person that got blown up. Parts of different people could have been amalgamated over the years of oral story telling.
The evidence for the Israelites being in Egypt is also nonexistent, outside of the bible. The Egyptians obviously did have slaves, as did all civilizations back then, and they were generally taken after battles or other conquests. However, all of the evidence shows that the Israelites formed out of people who lived in Canaan, which is where Lebanon and Syria are today. There is another theory that they were led by a small group of Semites who came from Egypt, and this could have been the seed of the exodus story. There is no evidence that there were any Israelite slaves in Egypt. If the Israelites had been slaves of Egypt and had risen up in the way that they did, it seems likely that some record would have been kept. Also, recent discoveries have shown that the great Egyptian monuments were actually built by hired workers and not slaves.
The last thing would be records of plagues. A plague that killed every first born in Egypt would be a significant event and there would be records of it. There are records of plagues in Egypt, just as there are in most other civilizations, but none of them say that only the first born children died.
So, if there were plagues, which there don’t appear to have been, what could have caused them. There are two theories that are sometimes put forward. The first is a volcanic eruption. A volcanic eruption could have caused toxic ash to fall into the river. This ash would have contained the mineral cinnabar, which could turn the Nile red. This would have increased the acidity in the river to the point where the fish died, and the frogs fled. The frogs would have died, and flies would have fed on them. The acid rain could have killed the animals and caused boils on people. There would have been dark skies, thunderstorms, and maybe even hail. The air would have been more humid, and locusts would have flourished. That is the first nine plagues, but the last one is harder.
Another theory is red algae. The Nile could have become infected with red algae, which took all of the oxygen out of the water, killing the fish and making the frogs flee. The flies would have come to feed on the dead fish and insects. The flies could have carried diseases that killed the livestock. The boils and the dead children could have been caused by eating the sick or dead animals, such as botulism. The storms, and days of darkness are more difficult to explain. So, there are ways to explain all of the plagues, but it would be pretty odd for them all to happen at the same time. Probably, just like most of the things in the bible, the idea is to take the message and not think about what is literally true. And this is what I learned today.
Image By Trailer screenshot, from DVD The Ten Commandments, 50th Anniversary Collection Paramount, 2006 – The Ten Commandments trailer, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2216811
Sources
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-13260-5_3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipuwer_Papyrus
https://www.gotquestions.org/evidence-ten-plagues.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/nov/30/moses-man-versus-myth-ridley-scott
https://thebiomedicalscientist.net/science/ten-plagues-egypt
https://time.com/5561441/passover-10-plagues-real-history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagues_of_Egypt
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-13-mn-50481-story.html