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

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Athalya Brenner-Idan
King David’s census, when 70,000 Israelites die before David buys Araunah’s
threshing floor and installs a sacrificial altar there (2 Samuel 24).
• As we can see from the examples cited above and further, animal and human
health catastrophes are mixed not only with violent death as a result of military
action, but also with natural catastrophes, as in the ‘‘curses’’ chapter in
Deuteronomy 28, or in the so-called ‘‘plagues of Egypt’’. Here, in these two
sources, some details are supplied. In Deuteronomy 28:20,
The LORD will let loose against you calamity, panic, and frustration in all the enterprises
you undertake, so that you shall soon be utterly wiped out because of
your evildoing in forsaking Me.
And so on and so forth, ‘‘until you are wiped out’’ (v. 24). Similarly, in Exodus
8---11, details are given of the Egyptian Passover ‘‘plagues’’, not called
magephah in the Hebrew text, although several of those afflictions mentioned
do qualify; but see specifically in 9:14:
For this time I will send all My plagues (magephotay) upon your person, and your
courtiers, and your people, in order that you may know that there is none like Me
in all the world. 4
• In 2 Samuel 12:15 god afflicted ‘‘the child that Uriah’s wife had borne to David,
and it became critically ill’’. And in 1 Samuel 25:38, in the Abigail story,
ten days after she returns from her trip to David god ‘‘struck Nabal and he
died’’. In both instances the Hebrew n-g-ph qal (cause to fall, be defeated) is
used but variously translated. Instructive is the double entendre, the verb
n-g-ph nif. and the noun magephah, in both senses of loss --- malady and loss
at war --- in 2 Samuel 18:7, when Absalom loses his war with his father David:
The men of Israel were defeated (wayinagephu) by the servants of David, and the
slaughter (hamagephah) there was great on that day, twenty thousand men
(NRSV).
3. Short Analysis of Examples and Terms
The examples briefly presented here are purposely not organized in any textual
order, since I wish to show that they, and the concepts behind them, are not
4
In the two parallel but different accounts of the Egyptian ‘‘plagues’’ in the Psalms (Ps
78:43---51; 105:26---35), magephah, n-g-ph, or makkah are not used; even the verb form
n-k-h hif., ‘‘hit, strike’’, is used only once, in the description of the firstborn ‘‘plague’’, in a
verse that is almost identical in the two texts (78:51; 105:35).