The arrows of pestilence have sunk deep into the tissue of many languages. Practically all the Hebrew words for plague (_Maggefah_, _Negef_, _Naga_, _Makkah_) indicate a blow. Our English ‘plague’ is derived through the Latin _plaga_ from the Greek πληγή, a blow: so too the German _plage_. The French _fléau_—a flail or a plague—embodies the same idea of a blow, and is derived from the Latin _flagellum_ and the Greek θλίβω. To-day even physicians must needs call the poisons of pestilence ‘toxines’, as though they were arrow-poisons discharged from a bow (τόξον from τυγχάνω = I hit). The Arabians speak of being ‘stung’ or ‘pricked’ with plague, recalling respectively the serpents and the arrows of pestilence.
Passing allusion has been made above to the plagues of Pharaoh: it remains only to be said that there is now pretty general agreement that these ten plagues represent merely the seasonal variations, to which Egypt is peculiarly liable, magnified in Jewish oral tradition. Perhaps the last plague, the death of the first-born, at the April of the exodus (_circa_ 1220 B.C.) may have been a true _pestis puerorum_, falling with chief severity on those who lacked the immunity afforded by a previous epidemic. It was the incursion of Libyans and of the nations of the Greek seas into Egypt, at least as much as the Biblical plagues, that enabled the Israelitish serfs to make good their escape.
During the period of wandering in the wilderness Korah, Dathan, and Abiram revolted against the ascendancy of Moses and Aaron, and God caused them to be swallowed up with all their households by an earthquake. Some of the children of Israel murmured against their fate. Those that did so were visited with a plague, that carried off 14,700 persons. The plague was stayed by Aaron offering incense as an atonement on the altar—sacrifice still, but the sacrifice only of a sweet savour to a God dwelling in heaven. The juxtaposition, if it be not permissible to say the association, of earthquake and pestilence in this narrative is noteworthy, in view of the widespread belief in their causal relationship, in later times.
All through the Old Testament plague is regarded, as here, as a direct consequence of God’s anger. In the New Testament it figures but little, and then rather as corrective than punitive. The God of the Old Testament is a God of vengeance: only in the later Prophets do we find even a foreshadowing of the God of love and forgiveness, the God of the New Testament. In portraying pestilence Art has retained this conception of God as a stern punisher of wrongdoing, but in the personality of Christ, approached through the mediation of the Madonna and Saints, has recognized the New Testament conception of God.