Steven Weitzman, a professor of Jewish Studies and religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, examines how people use the biblical story of the 10 plagues to make sense of catastrophe in their own lives in Disasters of Biblical Proportions: The Ten Plagues Then, Now, and at the End of the World (Princeton Univ., Feb.).
Analyzing retellings across Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, Weitzman argues that interpretations of the plagues help people find meaning amid crisis—including pandemics, wars, and social upheaval—while also allowing space for agency and creativity. “The story is very adaptable,” he tells PW.
We talked with Weitzman about meaning-making, biblical narratives, and why the story of the 10 plagues endures.
The idea for the book started with responses to the Covid-19 pandemic as well as the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attack. What did you notice during those moments?
Passover started about two weeks after the global Covid shutdown in 2020, and it’s traditional among Jews to recount the 10 plagues one by one as part of the Exodus story. That year, many people connected Covid to the plagues. After October 7, the story was invoked again, but in a very different way: as a model of righteous retribution against an oppressive enemy. The Covid retellings were infused with fear and anxiety; the post–October 7 versions with outrage and a demand for justice. I was struck by how dramatically the meaning changed.
What do the different retellings of the 10 plagues across those two events reveal about how people use biblical language in times of crisis?
People invoke the story when they’re dealing with shock, crisis, or injustice, but how they use it depends on who they are and what they’re experiencing. During Covid, people were grappling with trauma, isolation, and powerlessness, and the story helped them find edifying meaning. After October 7, people felt angry and victimized, and they used it to express those emotions. What fascinates me is how people take elements of the Bible and reshape them in light of their own needs, hopes, and fears.
You suggest that the plague narrative endures not because it’s theologically sophisticated, but because it speaks to emotions like powerlessness, guilt, and anger. What do you think the 10 plagues story allows people to say about disaster that more modern, secular explanations don't?
The core idea of the 10 plagues is that these disasters are part of the human experience, that they happen for a reason, and God is trying to accomplish some purpose through them, though the Bible is ambiguous about what that purpose is. For some people, the plagues were God's way of liberating Israelites from slavery. That allowed for interpretations that focus on disaster or violence as an instrument of positive change. Other people, however, identify with the Egyptians in the story, and that allowed for interpretations of disaster as a punishment for some sort of sin that needs to be rectified, and they reframed disaster as a goad for self-reflection and self-transformation. So it depends on what emotion you're bringing to the story. Are you bringing outrage? Are you bringing guilt? Are you bringing a desire for freedom? That will shape people's reimagining of the story.
Can you share one example that stayed with you of how the plagues narrative has been reimagined to help people cope with something difficult?
I was struck by the role that the plagues story played during the Civil War. People were using the Bible to make sense of the violence and destruction—Americans had never experienced anything like that before. The story template was used by Abolitionists to argue that the Civil War itself was a plague that had befallen the country because it persisted in enslaving people, that the only way to end the disaster was to end slavery and bring justice to the people who had been mistreated. It helped me see the idea that an experience like Covid, as scary and negative as it was, was also a call for people to examine themselves, and try to renew their commitment for making the world a better place. For me, that is what is so transformational about the plagues story. It connects the experience of disaster, which is part of every person's life, to the need to make the world a more just and equitable place: disaster can be an agent of redemption.
Why is this book so important now, in what you call “an age of cascading disaster and hard-heartedness?”
It feels like we're in a relentless parade of catastrophes that seem to be heading towards some even greater catastrophe. It was climate change for a long time, but now we're dealing with war and conflict in a way that we haven't experienced in the previous decade, and there is a sense of looming doom. The plagues template captures that experience, but it tries to say that there is the possibility of change. Pharaoh could, at any point during the story, change and un-harden his heart. The story resonated for me in a way to think more constructively and hold onto hope.
