Sir

A recent UK television programme, Equinox: The Ten Plagues of Egypt (Channel 4), gave a modern reappraisal of the sequence of biological and meteorological catastrophes recorded in the biblical book of “Exodus”.

It was proposed that, within the unavoidable constraints of the language used, the account can be taken as factual — and in particular that the sequence of these events is significant. The trigger was a red algal bloom that killed much of the life in the Nile, especially the fish which normally kept the toad population under control. It was argued that this led, by plausible steps, to plagues of flies and midges and hence to animal and human plagues for which they were vectors. The final catastrophe arose from the storage of wet grain contaminated by locust droppings which led to the poisoning of human and animal food supplies with microtoxins.

The corollary, which the programme did not stress, is the predictability of much of this sequence. Algal blooms must have occurred before (although perhaps not on such an epic scale) and farmers must have been forced to store wet grain in earlier harvests because of bad weather conditions. Observers must have seen and recorded the results. The educated elite must have known what to expect (and Moses had been adopted by Pharaoh's daughter and educated as a prince in the royal court). Armed with this knowledge, he would have been able to predict publicly, to good effect, the exact form each of the biological catastrophes would take, before it occurred.

The mistake was to educate Moses. One can picture the Pharaoh concurring with Oscar Wilde that no good deed goes unpunished.