Biblical plagues really happened say scientists [ Thera, global warming, yada yada yada ]

The Biblical plagues that devastated Ancient Egypt in the Old Testament were the result of global warming and a volcanic eruption, scientists have claimed. Researchers believe they have found evidence of real natural disasters on which the ten plagues of Egypt, which led to Moses freeing the Israelites from slavery in the Book of Exodus in the Bible, were based. But rather than explaining them as the wrathful act of a vengeful God, the scientists claim the plagues can be attributed to a chain of natural phenomena triggered by changes in the climate and environmental disasters that happened hundreds of miles away... which will be outlined in a new series to be broadcast on the National Geographical Channel on Easter Sunday. ...By studying stalagmites in Egyptian caves they have been able to rebuild a record of the weather patterns using traces of radioactive elements contained within the rock. They found that Rameses reign coincided with a warm, wet climate, but then the climate switched to a dry period... the arrival of the first plague, which in the Bible is described as the Nile turning to blood. Dr Stephan Pflugmacher, a biologist at the Leibniz Institute for Water Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin, believes this description could have been the result of a toxic fresh water algae... One of the biggest volcanic eruptions in human history occurred when Thera, a volcano that was part of the Mediterranean islands of Santorini, just north of Crete, exploded around 3,500 year ago, spewing billions of tons of volcanic ash into the atmosphere.

What a startling image, that first color panel is. It’s interesting that the phenomenon was well known and widespread enough to have had a conventionalized representation, the six pointed star with emanating, directional “rays” in both the painting and the woodcut. It’s almost laserlike in the color panel, looking as if it’s zapping a tower or steeple. I wonder what it actually is intended to represent?

The architecture, landscape and color of the roofs (unless it’s meant to represent roofs on fire) should provide a clue as to geographic origin. The odd, almost Hieronymus Bosch-like imagery of very pale people fixes it to northern Europe, but the architecture and roof color shifts it somewhat south, imho. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess Aquitaine.

Is that a two-headed calf? Children outside of the walled city, abandoned? It would seem to also represent a breakdown of both the social and natural order. A combination of amusement and fear is playing out upon their faces.

NEW LIGHT ON THE BLACK DEATH.LINK

Black Death, by Brueghel

Excerpt:

As it happens, in the 1340s there was a veritable rash of earthquakes. In Rosemary Horrox's book, The Black Death, quoted by Baillie, we find that a contemporary writer in Padua reported that not only was there a great earthquake on 25 January 1348, but it was at the twenty-third hour. In the thirty-first year of Emperoro Lewis, around the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul (25 January) there was an earthquake throughout Carinthia and Carniola which was so severe that everyone feared for their lives. There were repeated shocks, and on one night the earth shook 20 times. Sixteen cities were destroyed and their inhabitants killed.... Thirty-six mountain fortresses and their in habitants were destroyed and it was calculated that more than 40,000 men were swallowed up or overwhelmed. (The author goes on to say that he received information from "a letter of the house of Friesach to the provincial prior of Germany):

It says in the same letter that in this year [1348] fire falling from heaven consumed the land of the Turks for 16 days; that for a few days it rained toads and snakes, by which many men were killed: that a pestilence has gathered strength in many parts of the world. (Horrox) From Samuel Cohn's book: ... a dragon at Jerusalem like that of Saint George that devoured all that crossed its path .... A city of 40,000 ... totally demolished by the fall from heaven of a great quantity of worms, big as a fist with eight legs, which killed all by their stench and poisonous vapours. (Cohn)

A story by the Dominican friar Bartolomeo: ... massive rains of worms and serpents in parts of China, which devoured large numbers of people. Also in those parts fire rained from Heaven in the form of snow (ash), which burnt mountains, the land, and men. And from this fire arose a pestilential smoke that killed all who smelt it within twelve hours, as well as those who only saw the poison of that pestilential smoke. (Cohn) Cohn writes:

Nor were such stories merely the introductory grist of naïve merchants and possibly crazed friars ... [even] ... Petrarch's closes friend, Louis Sanctus, before embarking on his careful reporting of the plague... claimed that in September floods of frogs and serpents throughout India had presaged the coming to Europe in January of the three pestilential Genoese galleys... [even] ... the English chronicler Henry Knighton ... [reported how] ... at Naples the whole city was destroyed by earthquake and tempest. Numerous chroniclers reported earthquakes around the world, which prefigured the unprecedented plague. Most narrowed the event to Vespers, 25 January 1348. [...]

Of these earthquakes that "destroyed many cities, towns, churches, monasteries, towers, along with their people and beasts of burden, the worst hit was Villach in southern Austria. Chroniclers in Italy, Germany, Austria, Slavonia, and Poland said it was totally submerged by the quake with one in 10 surviving. (Cohn) A continental text dated Sunday 27 April 1348 states: They say that in the three months from 25 January [1348] to the present day, a total of 62,000 bodies were buried in Avignon. (Horrox)

I'd be interested in seeing that. In the meanwhile:

A Celestial Collision
by Larry Gedney
February 10, 1983
Early in the evening of June 18, 1178, a group of men near Canterbury, England, stood admiring the sliver of a new moon hanging low in the west. In terms they later described to a monk who recorded their sighting, "Suddenly a flaming torch sprang from the moon, spewing fire, hot coals and sparks." In continuing their description of the event, they reported that "The moon writhed like a wounded snake and finally took on a blackish appearance"... [P]lanetary scientist Jack Hartung of the State University of New York... gathered enough clues to suggest that a large asteroid... might have smacked into the moon just over the horizon on the back side. To test his suspicion, Hartung went to the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, and inspected Russian and American photographs of the moon's back side. Sure enough, in just the right place, he found a remarkably fresh crater, 12 miles across and twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. From it radiated white splatter marks for hundreds of miles... Such an impact, reason astrophysicists, would set the moon to ringing like a gong for thousands of years... At Texas' McDonald Observatory, astronomers Odile Calame and J. Derral Mulholland of the University of Texas find that the surface of the moon moves back and forth fully 80 feet! Such an oscillation clearly implies a collision with something large, sometime within the not-too-distant past, probably within the memory of mankind. The problem is that there is no way to peg the date exactly at 1178.

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/decameronintro.html

Boccaccio: THE DECAMERON , “INTRODUCTION”

Thirteen hundred and forty-eight years had passed since the fruitful Incarnation of the Son of God, when there came into the noble city of Florence, the most beautiful of all Italian cities, a deadly pestilence, which, either because of the operations of the heavenly bodies, or because of the just wrath of God...

Just guessing, but it might depend upon the origin of the reports, Earth was the centre of the Universe...and ‘rocks’ didn’t fall from the sky. Boccaccio was very brave to allude to ‘the operations of the heavenly bodies’ methinks.

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