Phillip A. Davis, Jr. | Daniel Lanzinger | Matthew Ryan Robinson (Eds.): What Does Theology Do, Actually? (Leseprobe)

54
Athalya Brenner-Idan
1. Pandemic / Epidemic in the Hebrew Bible
There is no equivalent word in the HB for our ‘‘pandemic’’ or ‘‘epidemic’’. By
‘‘pandemic’’ we now mean a serious health risk, seemingly spreading ever so
quickly everywhere, uncontrollable, or almost so, which affects individuals but
also vast collectives of numerous people, potentially fatally.
In the HB, the nouns magephah or negeph 2
that are usually translated as
‘‘plague’’ or ‘‘pandemic’’ and at times ‘‘pestilence’’ derive from the verb n-g-ph qal,
‘‘to strike, hit’’ (also in war). And the plagues of Egypt (Exodus 9) are in the Hebrew
makkot, plural of makkah from n-k-h hif. etc., again ‘‘hit, strike’’.
Even though a specifically designated term is missing, this does not mean
that fatal (health) plagues / epidemics are not known in the HB. On the contrary.
For instance, the HB narrates in three places (2 Kings 18---19; Isaiah 36---37; 2
Chronicles 32) how King Sennacherib of Assyria devastated the land of Judah,
but miraculously stopped his siege of Jerusalem and returned to his country
without conquering the city. This journey of Assyrian punishment is assigned to
701 BCE and is variously witnessed also by the extrabiblical sources of the Sennacherib
Prism, archaeological findings from Lachish and Azekah, the Siloam
Inscription, Flavius Josephus, Herodotus, and Berossus. Whereas the HB and
later Jewish traditions present the sudden lifting of the siege as a divine miracle,
external contemporaneous sources mention ‘‘plagues’’ of mice or even cholera
that attacked the Assyrian troops.
This instance, again, means that --- in spite of serving as headwords in different
semantic fields --- both groups of terms, and the extra-linguistic concepts that
underline them, are somehow connected, since they appear in both contexts of
war and of epidemics. As an aside: Indeed, the exclusive specialization of
magephah as ‘‘plague’’ or ‘‘pandemic’’, as separate completely from the signification
‘‘military defeat’’, is --- according to the historical dictionary of the Academy
for the Hebrew Language --- no younger than the 18 th
century CE. And while
makkah may still signify ‘‘hit, blow’’, magephah is the modern Hebrew term used
for epidemic / pandemic and never for defeat in war (although the related verb
is).
Now, our first task will be to find out why these two clusters of n-k-h and
n-g-ph -derived terms do double duty in the HB.
2
Throughout this article, I’ve opted to use the SBL’s so-called General Purpose method
rather than the Academic method for transcribing Hebrew words (in italics), since --- in my
view --- the former better conveys the Hebrew sound sense to non-Hebrew readers.