Exodus 9:8-12. Seventh Sign - Sixth Plague: Festering Boils (9:8–12) Although this sixth plague account mentions no overt verbal confrontation with Pharaoh

Exodus 9:8-12

Seventh Sign - Sixth Plague: Festering Boils (9:8–12)

• Although this sixth plague account mentions no overt verbal confrontation with Pharaoh (no catching him as he headed somewhere or spoken warning directly to him, or the like), both he and his magicians were required to witness the symbolic action that presumably took place outdoors.

• This is, by a slight margin, the shortest of the plague accounts, and yet its severity is clearly indicated in the words of v. 11, “The magicians could not stand before Moses because of the boils that were on them.”

• Nothing that had yet happened to the Egyptians had been so debilitating that it prevented their mobility. Here was a plague that no one could ignore or easily explain away as trivial.


• 9:8–9 – This plague is brought about by a transformation of one

substance into another, as was the case with the initial signs God gave Moses as proof of his being a true prophet.

– The transformation in this case involved filling his cupped hands full of soot from a furnace and throwing it skyward in the sight of Pharaoh.

– What started as a small amount of soot was changed and vastly multiplied by divine fiat into a huge amount of fine dust, covering Egypt and causing festering boils100 on both humans and animals.


• 9:10–11 – Verse 10 summarizes the fulfillment of the events that the

plague announcement predicted and it understandably contains, therefore, nothing truly surprising.

– An element of the story that could be considered somewhat unpredictable, however, is the mention of the magicians in v. 11. • They were last mentioned in 8:19 at the end of the third plague

(gnats/biting insects) where they admitted their inability to replicate the miraculous in that situation with the words, “This is the finger of God!”

• This present plague account is the last in which they appear; they are not mentioned again in Exodus or the entire Pentateuch for that matter.


• 9:10–11 • Why, then, are they brought into the narrative here? Presumably

for two reasons. – The first is to help the reader appreciate the fact that Pharaoh probably

used the magicians as advisors in dealing with the various plagues. » To the Egyptians the magical, the medicinal, and the miraculous were

all closely linked, and anything the magicians could do to alleviate the effects of a given plague or to show it to be something that they themselves could also do (on a small scale) would help bolster Pharaoh’s resistance to the demands made by Yahweh.

– The second is that if the physicians could not heal themselves (i.e., the magicians could not make themselves well from the boils) then the power of God over the powers resorted to by Pharaoh was obvious. » The magicians need not be mentioned again. They had been proved

impotent in the face of real power. – The boils were obviously debilitating; so sick and in pain were the

Egyptians from them that they were not physically able to be available for any sort of confrontation with Moses of the sort seen in the first three miracle accounts.


• 9:12 – Verse 12 closes out the brief plague account with yet

another, by now predictable, statement that Pharaoh remained unyielding.

– It is clear that Moses did not want the reader to forget that God caused this, according to the plan he had announced to Moses and Aaron from the start, for the reader has been reminded by the same words “just as the LORD had said to Moses” at the end of the story of Aaron’s rod changing into a snake (7:13), the first plague (7:22), the second plague (8:15), and the third plague (8:19).

– Thus these words are resumed here and will be again, with slightly different wording, at the conclusion of the next plague account (9:35).


• Excursus: Did Anthrax Cause the Fifth and Sixth Plagues?– A number of commentators, scholars, and even some medical

specialists have raised the possibility that plagues five and six both represent the effects of anthrax.

– The arguments in favor of this theory may be summarized with the following scenario:• Plague one, the turning of water to “blood,” killed many or most of

the fish in the Nile.• Since anthrax can at least theoretically breed in dead and rotting

fish, the huge quantity of rotting fish in and along the banks of the river could have provided a fertile medium for the multiplication of the bacillus anthracis.

• The frogs that had been in the Nile and were now driven from it by its pollution (plague two) carried the anthrax infection as they spread out over the land along the Nile.


• Excursus: Did Anthrax Cause the Fifth and Sixth Plagues?– Since virtually all of Egypt’s population in both ancient and modern times

was/is located very close to the Nile, the frogs were spreading the anthrax bacillus to much of the inhabited area of Egypt, including the locations where the Egyptian cattle grazed.

– What killed the frogs where they were—all over Egypt and in huge quantities—can be explained by anthrax.

• As the dead frog bodies rotted in the sun, anthrax was released in large quantities into the soil, where it could remain dormant almost indefinitely. But a long dormancy was not required in this case. – Even after the smell of the frogs (cf. 8:14) was gone because their bodies were

desiccated, the anthrax was alive and well in the soil and was beginning to spread to the grasses as they grew from the soil where the frogs had died.

• When cattle grazed over these grasses, plague five, the death of the cattle, was caused by anthrax as it multiplied without check in the bodies of the cattle.


• Excursus: Did Anthrax Cause the Fifth and Sixth Plagues?• Meanwhile, the breeding conditions for various sorts of flies (plague

four) (and, incidentally, mosquitoes, plague three) were ideal since the Nile as well as the various stagnant pools of water along the Nile contained large amounts of rotting fish that were anthrax-infected.

• The rotting carcasses of frogs likewise contained anthrax, as would the rotting carcasses of dead cattle.

• From any and all of these sources, the various flies, but particularly the stomoxis calcitrans, fed and multiplied, becoming carriers of anthrax.

• Anthrax spores that are inhaled or ingested by humans in large quantities can cause death as anthrax overwhelms the immune system. – Cutaneous anthrax (skin anthrax), however, is not usually fatal. It causes

festering sores on the skin, which are painful and debilitating, but most people recover fully from skin anthrax eventually.

– The description of what the Egyptians were suffering in plague six (9:9–10) would seem to comport with an epidemic infestation of anthrax.


• Excursus: Did Anthrax Cause the Fifth and Sixth Plagues?– The problems with the theory that anthrax caused the fifth

and sixth plagues, however, are several. • First, the theory reflects a normal human tendency to reduce the

supernatural to what the natural can comprehend. – In effect, people tend to read the brief and rather general descriptions of

the effects of the plague(s) and—sometimes quite unconsciously—ask “what natural event that I do understand would come closest to being an explanation for this biblical event, the origin and characteristics of which otherwise I do not understand?

– The desire to understand an event tends to make a naturalistic explanation enticingly attractive and a supernatural explanation off-putting.

– If the Bible mentions a divinely caused disease, many people immediately search for whatever known disease seems to come closest to what the Bible describes and assume that to be what the disease must actually have been.

– Likewise with disasters, floods, the glory/fire atop Sinai, the empty tomb, and so on. It is always tempting to “demythologize” biblical miracles.


• Excursus: Did Anthrax Cause the Fifth and Sixth Plagues?• Second, the fifth and sixth plagues do not fit a key criterion for natural

epidemics or disasters because they do not develop naturally, that is, gradually and inconsistently from person to person or animal to animal. – They come about virtually instantaneously and uniformly, according to timing

that is not controlled by nature but overtly by God. – One reason for specifically granting Pharaoh the choice of time for ending the

plague of frogs (8:9) was surely so that those who followed the plague stories closely would be reminded of their supernatural origin and conclusion.

• Third, as the biblical text itself makes clear (12:12), the plagues were not mere natural developments but were supernatural developments related to the natural sphere—purposeful evidences of divine control over the natural world of Egypt designed to show the one true God’s superiority over the natural world as it was (pantheistically) conceived by the Egyptians. – In other words, the plagues imitated nature in certain ways as a means of

showing God’s control over nature (and its “gods”)—ways that can make it easy for a reader mistakenly to think that the plagues were merely natural.


• Excursus: Did Anthrax Cause the Fifth and Sixth Plagues?

• Fourth, with regard specifically to the sixth plague, the cause of the disease does not appear to be consistent with its type. – Fine particles or airborne dust normally would be associated more with a

dust storm (in extreme form a “sand storm”) than with anthrax, and contact with airborne particulates would be likely to cause the inhaled form of the disease at least as frequently if not more commonly than the skin form, producing death in great numbers rather than simply festering sores.

• Finally, it is not entirely clear that the fifth and sixth plagues were a single disease, whatever the type. – Many things can cause cattle to die; many things can give animals and

humans skin lesions. – The most convincing, contextually based understanding of the fifth and sixth

plagues, in fact, is that they were somewhat epidemic-like supernatural events intended to humiliate the gods of Egypt, the Egyptians in general, and Pharaoh in particular and show the objective observer that there was only one God in whom faith should be placed.


• Excursus: Did Anthrax Cause the Fifth and Sixth Plagues?– Were there any objective observers to benefit from the

demonstration of true divine power inherent in the plagues? • The answer is yes. • The “great mixed multitude” (12:38; NIV “many other people”) of

non-Egyptian, non-Israelite people living in Egypt along with the Israelites had no reason to identify either with the Egyptians or with the Israelites in analyzing the plagues. – They simply saw them for what they were: proof that the God of Israel was

supreme over Egypt and the Egyptians and one whose people they ought to join with if they wished to enjoy a redeemed future.

– For them the plagues showed the way to salvation by forcibly calling their attention to the God who saves.

– Accordingly, they seized the chance to leave Egypt when the Israelites did.

Douglas K. Stuart, Exodus, vol. 2, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2006), 105–182.

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Exodus 9:8-12. Seventh Sign - Sixth Plague: Festering Boils (9:8–12) Although this sixth plague account mentions no overt verbal confrontation with Pharaoh