How Science Can Explain the 10 Plagues of Exodus

(Photo by Wayne Robinson on Unsplash)

Many read the Exodus account without even considering that the plagues might have been a domino effect from first to last, each one inseparably linked in a sequential order, and also miss the question of why the plagues were carried out in this specific succession.

According to the documentary film The Exodus Decoded, the 10 plagues of Egypt—just as in the book of Exodus and in the same exact order—occurred twice in small Cameroon villages in the 1980s.

We have photos, testimonies and historical documentation of these disasters. Both tragedies began when iron-rich water from the deepest crevices of the lake floor was released via earthquakes (a "lake overturning"), mixed with the rest of the water, formed an iron hydroxide (basically rust) and turned the color of the entire lake from blue to a deep red.

Have you ever bitten your tongue and tasted that iron-metallic taste? If so, you can probably see how the Israelites/Egyptians may have described a high-iron, gas-poisoned, blood-colored water substance as blood, if that was what they were dealing with.

Without a doubt, many followers of the Abrahamic faiths will believe the Exodus narrative to be describing a literal blood, as opposed to any gas-leak phenomenon that may have occurred as a result of the volcano-induced earthquakes happening in the same place at around the same time.

However, my purpose is not to argue this blood-versus-gas issue one way or the other. Nor is it to accept the documentary's explanation on all, or even any, of the plagues of Egypt.

I am interested only in discussing a hypothetical scientific and natural approach to what could happen after the waters are essentially rendered poisonous and unlivable/undrinkable, which in Egypt could have happened regardless of whether it was blood or gas.

Here is the order of the plagues of Egypt:

—Water into blood.

—Frogs.

—Gnats (or lice).

—Flies.

—Death of livestock.

—Boils.

—Hail.

—Locusts.

—Darkness.

—Death of firstborn.

What might have occurred in Egypt from a natural-disaster purview? Using the Cameroon tragedies, we can retrace and then project the following:

Once the oxygen in the lake water is stripped to below the point of survival for underwater animals as a result of the first plague, they die, and their corpses begin to rot. If the water wasn't already poisonous by this time, it certainly would be now.

Unlike fish, frogs have the ability to leave the water, fleeing from the suffocation of aquatic pollution. This explains the second plague.

Winged pests attracted to the smells of death and rot would logically swarm any people and/or animals living in close proximity to a lake filled with dying (or already deceased) fish. Without clean water, bacterial outbreaks drawing gnats, lice and flies occur, explaining the third and fourth plagues.

The livestock, vulnerable to both the contaminated water and the disease carried by flies, and more, begin to drop one by one in a death epidemic matching proportions of plague five. The enormous skin blisters found on the human and animal bodies (both corpses and survivors) of the Lake Nyos residents in Cameroon in 1986 show that continual and intense exposure to decomposing flesh, poisonous waters and disease (as well as acidic gases in the air) can most certainly lead to what we see described as boils in the sixth plague.

From this moment, makers of the documentary rely on the idea that the volcano that erupted around the time of the Exodus story would have released ash high into the air nearby. Volcanologists acknowledge that when cooler sections of this ash cloud accumulate with atmospheric moisture and water vapors, it creates a type of hailstone called a nucleus.

This, in addition to the fiery fallout of the eruption, creates accretionary lapilli, or "volcanic hail," giving enlightenment to the otherwise impossible weather phenomenon of plague seven. If this sudden shift in climate conditions was in fact occurring at the time and in the area of the plagues of Egypt, then it stands to reason that locusts—which corporately relocate en masse in heavy, flurrying numbers toward heat—would ravage the Egyptians and account for plague eight.

Plague nine, darkness, is explained by The Exodus Decoded as the ash clouds of the eruption finally reaching the air around the Nile River and casting the land in thick shadows.

Finally, the gas leak at the bottom of the waters that started all of these events (approximately six months prior) finally reached the surface, releasing a carbon dioxide fog that traveled across the top of the water, sweeping its deadly mist onto the nearby land. The gases eventually rose up and dissipated, becoming harmless, but not before they claimed the life of any person who went to bed that night with a close-to-the-ground (or floor) bedding arrangement. Here is plague 10.

It's common to view God's wrath as more of a random series, basing the arrangement of disasters on His prerogative alone and not necessarily on a scientific and natural sequence of events.

Yet though God frequently defies the laws of science and nature throughout the Bible (and still today), proving that He is never bound by such laws, there are times when He will use the natural, scientific progression of events to accomplish His will, since He is the Creator of even science. Exodus may well have been one of those occasions.

This article is adapted from The Wormwood Prophecy: NASA, Donald Trump, and a Cosmic Cover-Up of End-Time Proportions by Thomas Horn. Copyright ©2019 Published by Charisma House. Used by permission.


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