For years, skeptics have debated the hot-topic of whether the events described as the Passover story could ever be scientifically possible. On one end, Sigmund Freud, calling the Passover story a “pious myth,” asserts that the entire story was made up as a political ploy and could never have happened. On the other end, scholars, including Josephus Flavius, maintain that the splitting of the sea could have theoretically happened, but not necessarily as a miracle. He writes that it could have been “God’s will or of natural origin,” casting doubt on its relevance to the divine connection these events have within our tradition.
One scientist, Florida State oceanographer Doron Nof conducted an experiment investigating whether the parting of the sea could be reproduced under experimental conditions. Using a wind set-down effect, he found that it is, in fact, possible to cause a sea level drop of about 2.5 meters at certain wind velocities, which may have possibly exposed an underwater ridge that the Jews walked across. Although Nof estimates that the likelihood of such a weather combination occurring is less than once every 2,400 years, his experiment was nonetheless successful in demonstrating that this phenomenon is plausible from a physical standpoint.
This wind setdown effect, defined as the drop in water level caused by wind stress, is actually discussed at length in scientific literature and is commonly accepted – by those who believe – as the mechanism by which the sea was split. In an article published on the dynamics of wind setdown in Egypt, Carl Drews and Weiquing Han conducted a satellite to analyze the topography of the Eastern Nile Delta, where a branch of the Nile once flowed into a coastal lagoon. Based on geological evidence and a historical description of a strong wind event in 1882, a hydrodynamic mechanism was proposed that describes how a body of water could divide under wind stress.
A novel theory was also developed by John Marr who was fascinated with the ten plagues and sought to find a scientific explanation for them. What is so interesting about his theory is how it resonates with the modern epidemiological analysis of emerging infections not wholly dissimilar to outbursts of mad cow disease and lethal viral diseases that regularly pepper the news.
He lays out the scenario in his paper as a crescendo of linked events, beginning with the first plague, blood. Marr believes that this ‘blood’ was actually caused by red algae that sucked all of the oxygen out of the water and produced toxins that killed the fish living in it. The lack of oxygen therefore forced all of the frogs out of the water, but they soon died since amphibians cannot breathe on land indefinitely.
Meanwhile, since there were no longer frogs to eat the insects, they proliferated and could have been involved in the plague of lice, along with the possibility of certain vermin laying eggs in the dust and their larvae eating off the remains of the fish and frogs. The dust they inhabited could have been what swept onto the Egyptian population, as the Torah recounts in Sefer Shemot, the book of Exodus: “the dust of the land turned into lice.”
One of the vermin in the dust has also been found to cause African horse sickness and Bluetongue, two diseases that affect cattle and sheep and could explain part of the fourth and fifth plagues. Boils, the sixth plague, may have then come from glanders, a highly contagious airborne bacterial disease spread by direct contact by flies or by eating tainted meat.
Ultimately, Marr continues down the list of plagues, concluding with the death of the first born, thought to be derived from an airborne mycotoxin released by a certain black fungus. Marr maintains that as millions of starving and weak Egyptians rushed to their granaries for food after the three days of darkness, the first to enter, likely the most important members of the family, such as the first born, would be blasted with these airborne toxins.
While Marr’s research is certainly a rational means of demystifying a tradition of miracles, it does not undermine the veneration of the Pesach story. God working through natural ways is a concept we have accepted for generations. As Rabbi Avi Weiss says, “even if it looks natural, it has a supernatural imprimatur. That it happens when it happens, to whom it happens, indicates a higher power.”