Let me deal with a question that was raised: "What is currently known about relationships between the severity and timing patterns of these biblical plagues and naturally occurring events such as pandemics or other disasters?" (Thank you to Chris Martens for the question.)
What is known is lot more than I know. Archaeologists and geologists know a lot about ancient disasters. Only recently, however, have we gained the facility to use historical DNA to determine causes of death, including mass deaths, in antiquity. Being but a humble Biblical scholar and small town Methodist preacher boy, I am not sufficiently knowledgeable in these areas to say much, especially on historical DNA. Here are a few things we do know from archaeology and geology:
The land of Israel sits in the Jordan rift valley, one of the world's major fault lines. Earthquakes are not uncommon. Many are mentioned in the Bible. The plagues I referred to in the Numbers 16 passage yesterday are preceded by an earthquake (Numbers 16:31-35). Amos dates his book in Amos 1:1 by mentioning the kings of Israel and Judah at the time and adding, "two years before the earthquake." The gospels speaks of an earthquake at the time of Jesus death. In Mark 13:8 Jesus speaks of earthquakes to come during the Jewish War (or the apocalypse, if you prefer to read Mark 13 that way). Revelation, of course, has its earthquakes.
Floods are less common in Israel. It is an arid land with only one significant river, the Jordan, which is itself not a large river. In Egypt, there is one river, the Nile and it is large. Until the building of the High Aswan Dam in the 1950's the Nile flooded every year. The floods were usually predictable, but could be very large in some years. In other, rare, years, the Nile could be down but never dry.
The Tigris and Euphrates Valley in ancient Babylon (modern day Iraq) was much more prone to flooding. A number of ancient Near Eastern cultures have flood stories. The most famous, other than the Noah story in the Bible, is the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic, written around 2600 BC. The Noah story was written around 950 BC. Although the Gilgamesh story is in many ways utterly different from the Noah story, there are distinct similarities. Utnapishtim, the Gilgamesh Noah, builds a big boat and escapes a flood that covers the earth. A striking similarity with Noah is that Utnapishtim sends out a dove to determine whether the flood has sufficiently subsided for land to have surfaced.
Many have taken the Gilgamesh epic as demonstrating that the Noah story is a fictional adaptation of much earlier Near Eastern flood stories. The presence of such flood stories leads others to think that there was in Near Eastern historical memory an actual massive flood, and that the Noah story, like the Gilgamesh Epic, preserves a deep historical memory of an actual event, just as Gilgamesh does, each of these stories developed by their own writers. If you read Gilgamesh, and it's been a couple of decades since I last read it, you will find both its larger story (the flood is only one many cuneiform tablets in the entire epic) and its mythology to be far more different from Genesis than similar.
Part 3 will return to God and the Coronavirus. Questions still welcomed.
Faithfully,
Christian
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