Frogs, and Locusts, and Lice, Oh My!

The script for Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments reads:

E-31 Ext. River’s Edge—Full Shot—Reeds—(Night)

Dimly seen amid the reeds and mud, there is a stirring of formless reptiles. Though they are frogs, they more resemble the indistinct shapes of a nightmare. Their hoarse voices blend into a symphony of sound and music, as they ooze up by hundreds out of the murky slime.

E-32 Int. Nefretiri’s Bedchamber—Medium Shot—Nefretiri—(Night) (A. D. 519)

She is sleeping. The blend of music and croaking heard on the riverbank now is growing in volume to fill the chamber. Nefretiri, awakened, sits up—pressing back in terror from what she sees, coverlet clutched to her throat. CAMERA PULLS BACK to reveal the swarm of dimly seen frogs invading the bedchamber. Some are even slithering up between the ibex bedposts of Nefretiri’s couch. Her maidservant cowers against the wall, frozen with horror, as Nefretiri leans back further against the bed curtains.

The prop team had even made a hundred rubber frogs connected to electricity that made their legs move. But it was not to be. Steven Weitzman writes:

For all the ingenuity and effort invested in the scene . . . DeMille ultimately decided that he could not use the footage for one simple reason—it was too funny. When people on the studio lot previewed the footage that summer, the response was not horror but laughter. Anne Baxter’s reaction [as princess Nefretiri] to the latex frogs was over the top.

Although DeMille declined to include frogs in his epic, Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 film Magnolia, starring Tom Cruise, has (spoiler alert) frogs raining down from the heavens in the movie’s climax to tragicomic effect. Weitzman understands the famous scene as illustrating the “contradiction at the core of life, the dissonance between its indifferent randomness and the human need to believe that some invisible force is watching.” This after Magnolia threads visual references to Exodus 8:2 (“Aaron held out his arm over the waters of Egypt, and the frogs came up and covered the land of Egypt.”) throughout its three-plus hours.

In Disasters of Biblical Proportions: The Ten Plagues Then, Now, and at the End of the World, Steven Weitzman shows how God’s punishments of Pharaoh’s Egypt have been understood, envisioned, artistically rendered, reimagined, and politically repurposed from antiquity to modern Hollywood.

Take the blood. An ancient midrash has “the scheming Egyptians [prohibiting] Israelite women from purifying themselves after their menstruation, thus preventing them from having sex with their husbands and bearing any more children.” In an example of the rabbinic “principle of measure for measure,” the theory goes, God punished them “by turning the waters of Egypt into blood.”

The medieval illuminated Venice Haggadah assumes the same principle when it shows “Pharaoh bathing in the blood of murdered Israelite children,” suggesting that the initial plague was an enactment of justice for Pharaoh’s infanticide. Citing the historian Ephraim Shoham-Steiner, Weitzman raises the likely possibility that the Haggadah’s image was also a response to the medieval blood libel. It was our ancient enemies, not us, who were so bloodthirsty that they killed babies, the illumination implicitly argues.

With the establishment of the State of Israel, there have been many variations on the statement that the country (not God) will be the one meting out the punishment against the Jews’ enemies. In 1975, the Zionist group Betar threw blood on the floor (as well as live frogs, locusts, and mice, for good measure) at the Pan American World Airways New York headquarters to protest the plight of Syrian Jews, since Pan Am was the only US-to-Syria service. On October 11, 2023, Israeli politician Benny Gantz declared that in response to Hamas’s attack, “the rewards of our enemies will be blood, fire and pillars of smoke,” a well-known line from the Passover Haggadah summarizing the plagues.

The lice of the third plague, which Pharaoh’s court magicians could not replicate because they attest to “the finger of God,” inspires Weitzman to review the history of sleight of hand. In his 1868 book, Secrets of Conjuring and Magic, or How to Become a Wizard, Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin described the Egyptians “who ventured to compete with the miracles of Moses” as practicing “pretended magic.” Erik Weisz took his stage name, Harry Houdini, in tribute to Robert-Houdin. In discussing Houdini’s contests with spiritual mediums, a 1926 article in Life traced such conflicts back to Moses’s contest with Pharaoh’s magicians. A great deal of the fun of Weitzman’s book is in such colorful historical digressions.

In 1749, Weitzman informs us, “in the town of Northampton [England], the minister Samuel King delivered a sermon . . . ‘The Hand of the Lord upon the Cattle Considered and Improved’
. . . [that] asserted that the recent death of cattle was ‘the finger of God’ sent to punish and instruct the people of England” for their wayward behavior, as the fifth plague had punished the Egyptians. Others have focused on the stricken animals themselves. The great writer Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh (Mendele Mocher Sforim) identified so strongly with abused animals “that he went on to write an autobiographical piece called The Book of Cattle in which he recalls protecting an orphaned heifer from mistreatment only to make himself a target.” More recently, an organization called Jewish Veg produced a Vegan Haggadah that argues that the “lesson to learn [from this plague] is to fight the abuse of farm animals.”

When billions of locusts devastated large swaths of Africa and Asia, a young Kashmiri actress named Zaira Wasim quote-tweeted the Quran: “So we sent upon them the flood and locusts and lice and frogs and blood: signs openly self-explained; but they were steeped in arrogance—a people given to sin.” When she was attacked for calling poor farmers sinners who had provoked God’s punishment, she resigned from social media and Bollywood.

Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, which was both Good Friday and the fifth day of Passover. Among the Bible verses that came up repeatedly in the mournful sermons that weekend was the Exodus 12:30 description of the final plague, that of the firstborn: “Henry Ward Beecher . . . [noted] how every virtuous household in the land felt [Lincoln’s death] as if its first-born were gone.”

Weitzman also tells a remarkable story of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s burning of Atlanta in the previous year. David Mayer, a Jewish merchant, discovered that Sherman was a member of the same Masonic fraternity as he was. Imitating the lamb’s blood smeared on the entrance to Israelite homes in Egypt, Mayer placed an apron with the insignia of the fraternity “on the doorpost of his home in the hope that it would be spared.” It was. Ben Mayer, David’s great-great-great-grandson, says they still tell the story every Passover.

Near the beginning of his study, Weitzman writes:

Exodus makes clear that the main purpose of the plagues was to force the Egyptians to free the Hebrews, rather than to punish the Egyptians for their crimes . . . a punishment that was terrible but fully deserved and rightly imposed. . . . [But] what was God punishing? And why did he choose these specific punishments?

Weitzman mentions in passing that Philo thought the death of cattle to be a strike against “gods in the Egyptian animal cult, such as the bull god Apis and the ram god Amun.” Many modern scholars, including Joshua Berman, Ziony Zevit, and Gary A. Rendsburg, have noted how specific Egyptian gods seem to have been the target of the plagues. Heqat, the goddess of fertility, for instance, took the form of a frog. But Weitzman is far more interested in how the story has lived in Jewish (and, to a lesser extent, Christian and Muslim) culture than in learned theories.

In his conclusion he writes:

The history of retelling the ten plagues begins with Moses’s command to the Israelites to tell the story of Passover to their children, but as far back as we can trace, people have not been content to merely repeat the tale as they heard it from others, expanding on Exodus to make it say what they wanted or needed it to say, and that process of breaking and remaking its story has proved its own kind of freedom.

Anyone who’s ever been at a Seder with a preschooler knows that Weitzman is right. Consider Canadian Hebrew school teacher Shirley Cohen Steinberg’s classic 1951 ditty that begins: “One morning when Pharaoh woke in his bed / There were frogs in his bed and frogs on his head.” The original lyrics ended, “Frogs were jumping everywhere.” But it now inevitably culminates with a new line that every four-year-old wants or needs it to say: “Even in his underwear!”

Cecil B. DeMille’s giggling test audience would have understood.