Were the 10 Plagues Natural or Supernatural?

By Rabbi Alex Freedman.

When we are young and first hear about the Ten Plagues, it’s the most incredible thing. We imagine these 10 divine miracles which preceded our people’s freedom in vivid color. When G-d broke the laws of nature to demonstrate His presence and power. It must have been like a Hollywood movie, we think; no wonder film directors have turned to it again and again. 

But as we get older, we are inevitably exposed to a different line of reasoning. One that explains these plagues as natural, not supernatural. As within the laws of nature, and not beyond. For example, here is our own Etz Hayyim Humash commentary explaining the first plague, turning the Nile to blood: 

“This plague has been explained as the intensification of a phenomenon that occurs periodically in the Nile valley. The river is fed by melting snow and summer rains that pour down from the highlands of Ethiopia and carry with them sediment from the tropical red earth of that region. And abnormally heavy rainfall would lead to an excessively high rise of the Nile and wash down into it inordinate amounts of the red sediment. Thus, the river, unable to absorb the substance as it would during a gradual rise of its waters, takes on a bloody hue.”

You get the idea. Each of the plagues can likewise be explained according to the rules of nature (although I’m not sure how academics explain the death of the firstborn). 

Doesn’t this second line of reasoning, which appeals to modern sensibilities, remove G-d from the picture? Put this way, they don’t sound like miracles at all! The plagues sound like a coincidence or a chance event. It sounds like G-d isn’t even there, which sort of defeats the whole purpose of the plagues. The whole takeaway for Egypt and Israel was that G-d was there and was on the side of freedom. Is there a way to resolve this tension, to harmonize G-d and the rules of nature? 

I believe there is, and it’s Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, of blessed memory, who says it best: 

“The plagues themselves occupy the borderline, so common to the Torah, between the natural and the supernatural. Commentators have been divided between those who emphasize their miraculous character and others who have sought to provide a scientific account of the disasters in terms of a series of chain reactions to an initial ecological disaster, possibly the appearance of algae in the Nile which turned the water red and caused the fish to die. Which view speaks more compellingly to us will depend on whether we understand by the word ‘miracle’ – a suspension of the laws of nature, or any event which occurs within nature, but by happening, when and to whom it does, reveals a providential pattern in history.”

He doesn’t pick a side here but explains that either take – the supernatural or the natural – reveal the hand of G-d. When a swarm of locusts makes its way across a plain and consumes everything on trees, that’s just nature at work. But when those locusts consume everything in the exact place and the exact time for the exact reason that G-d determines and Moses announces, that’s not a coincidence. That is G-d, the supernatural, using the laws of nature to prove that G-d is beyond nature. Even for those of us who are convinced that the Nile turning to blood was really just about the algae, to quote Fiddler on the Roof, that was a miracle too.