Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been fascinated by the plague of darkness. Maybe it’s the cinematic immediacy of it, the relatability of the fear of the dark; maybe it’s that of all the plagues, the ninth is the most purely psychological — the darkness isn’t said to damage the crops or the livestock or the people or the buildings or any other part of Mitzráyim’s physical infrastructure; it is a plague of pure foreboding, of dread. The lights go out, and they do not come back on again.

And, of course, it’s not an ordinary darkness. In Shəmot 10:21, G-d announces that there will be Darkness upon the land of Mitzráyim, and then adds two words: וְיָמֵשׁ חֹֽשֶׁךְ | vəyameish ḥóshekh.

The second of these, ḥóshekh, is simple enough: It’s the noun that means “darkness”. The first is a verb, and it looks like it should come from the root משׁשׁ | MShSh, which connotes feeling about by touch alone — while it can be a simple touching, it’s more commonly the kind of feeling about you do when you reach into a cluttered backpack and feel around for a doodad you hope is still in there.

It’s a little tricky to fit these two words together as they appear in the received text. The verb is conjugated in a form that should mean “he will feel about”, and if the second word were בַּחֹֽשֶׁךְ | baḥóshekh | “in the darkness”, we would be firmly in idiomatic territory — Biblical Hebrew will often use a third-person masculine singular verb in a generic sense: There will be darkness on the land and people will fumble about in the darkness. Fine. But we don’t get baḥóshekh, we just get ḥóshekh, which seems like it would yield the ungrammatical “and people will fumble about darkness”. If darkness were the object of the verb, we would expect something more like וְיָמֵשׁ אֶת הַחֹֽשֶׁךְ | vəyameish et haḥóshekh | “and a person will feel the darkness”. It’s hard not to conclude that something’s been garbled in transmission here, but in my obstinate little way, I want to grapple with the received text anyway. The traditional gloss — “a darkness that can be touched” — will work well enough to get us underway. Just know that the underlying grammar is a little hinky.

What does it mean for there to be a darkness a person yameish? At the very least, a tangible darkness suggests more than the starlight dimness of an ordinary night. It suggests a heaviness, an oppressiveness, a depth of shadow so absolute that it weighs a person down. (And, indeed, two verses later, we read that those enmeshed in the darkness could not move about from place to place.)

It might also suggest that there’s something in the air causing the darkness. Rambam alludes to this possibility in his commentary on Shəmot 10:23, citing Ibn Ezra’s experiences with thick, impenetrable fogs on the Atlantic Ocean [a]. It is a possibility that also comes up in one of my least favorite social media posts of all time.

[a] I am grateful to ada morse for posting about this teaching and thus bringing it to my attention.

The post in question attempts to explain the plague narrative as a mythologized cultural memory of the Minoan Eruption of Thera/Santorini in the Bronze Age. The tangible darkness of the ninth plague, this post posits, is nothing more than a dense cloud of volcanic ash. Terrible, yes, but fathomable, explicable.

Nevermind that the timing doesn’t really check out and that the sequence of plagues doesn’t really line up with the sequence of a distant volcanic super-eruption — beyond the factual inaccuracies, my deeper issue with the post (and other similar approaches to the book of Exodus) is that it trivializes the text. It’s so much more boring than engaging with Shəmot on its own terms.

I am not making the claim that the Exodus literally happened historically exactly as it is written in Torah, with G-d and miracles and millions of people traipsing about the desert. I’m not even claiming it happened at all. But the text we have, as a text, regardless of its origin and accuracy, is a deep and challenging one. It’s a story about doing terrible things in pursuit of freedom, a freedom that, once achieved, is only achieved imperfectly, shot thru with contradictions, absurdities, and failures. What is justified in pursuing liberation? What unjustified things are inevitable when freedom is denied? How perfectly must we achieve our goals before we celebrate success? These are the questions Shəmot confronts us with, and they are questions that will never have final answers; we must grapple with anew in each new time and each new place.

It flattens this rich text to turn it into merely a record of some natural calamity. In a sense, seeking to anchor this narrative in some objective external event is an enactment of the ninth plague itself: We gain something tangible at the expense of interpretative depth; we have something to hold on to, and it cuts us off from understanding.

Rambam’s is not the only commentary on this bit of Exodus that seeks to explain the tangibility of the darkness. The fourteenth-century Spanish commentator Baḥya ben Asher posits that the darkness was not an external phenomenon at all. He writes:

[T]he darkness was not a kind of solar eclipse. On the contrary, the sun operated completely normally during all these days. In fact, the whole universe operated normally; the palpable darkness was as if each individual Egyptian had been imprisoned all by himself in a black box seeing the atmosphere of Egypt had been darkened. . . . [I]t is a scientific fact that just as a voice penetrates solids in order to reach the ears of the listener, so light, especially light emanating in heaven (sky), does the same. The miracle was that G-d interfered with this system of light reaching the Egyptians. He shut off every Egyptian’s “antenna” for these light waves without interfering with the source of their transmission. . . . Once this stage had been reached, G-d intensified this darkness to the extent that it was felt physically, preventing people from being able to move without “bumping” into darkness at every move they tried to make. The reason all this did not affect the Israelites was that their “antennae” had not been deprived of the ability to absorb light waves [b].

[b] This is Eliyahu Munk’s translation, available in complete form on Sefaria.

Besides the delightful image of antennae (as in insects, not televisions, I’m pretty sure), I find this idea of G-d enacting the ninth plague not by sending an actual darkness but instead by disrupting the Egyptians’ senses provocative and intriguing. Shəmot 10:23 says that in the darkness, לֹא־קָֽמוּ אִישׁ מִתַּחְתָּיו | lo qámu ish mitaḥtav | “no person got up from their place”, and I think there’s mileage to be gotten out of taking that very literally: During the plague of darkness, the people of Mitzráyim could not move at all; there was complete cessation.

Obviously, there is much to be said here about disability. But given the preternatural nature of the tale and the lack of concern with dehydration and starvation (being blind and paralyzed doesn’t stop a person from needing to eat and drink!), here I want to understand this less as a cessation of ability than as a cessation of biology. If the darkness threatens to undo the first act of creation (“Let there be light!”), the absolute stillness threatens to undo the breathing-in of life to the clay form of Adam; the Egyptians’ bodies are rendered as inactive as the dust from whence they, Biblically, came.

And what of the Egyptians themselves during these three days? If this plague severs the link between self and body, perhaps they spent these seventy two hours as souls absolute, unconfined by the dust and ashes of embodiment. The Torah tells us nothing of that experience, directly. But perhaps we can find hints in the story all the same.

Tyrants of all stripes thrive when the people they rule are exhausted, downtrodden, too tangled up in the hustle and bustle of daily affairs to stop and think and dream about other ways that life could be, to gather and discuss and plan ways to change the conditions of their lives. It benefits a tyrant if everyone is busy all the time.

The Pharaoh of this tale is certainly a tyrant, and here, suddenly, his people are granted rest. Everything stops, there is no concern for bodily continuance, only absolute essence, an incorporeal existence. One thinks, perhaps, of the Rawlsian veil of ignorance. I imagine they had time to ponder: Is this really how we want to live? When the light comes back, will we go back to the same labors under the sun? A mixed multitude goes up from Mitzráyim with the Israelites; how many of them decided to quit the tyrant’s country in the stillness of the extended, unseeing night? This, more than any other, is a plague against the state of Mitzráyim as a state, not against its peoples’ ability to survive.

In middle school, I went to an outdoorsy summer camp that sometimes took us caving. Mostly not to big spectacular crystal-strewn caverns, mostly just to little gnarly grottoes eaten away in the local limestone hills. On one such expedition, hundreds of feet underground, we all turned off our flashlights and headlamps and let the darkness swallow us. We felt the weight of the earth, its unfathomable tons of solid damp precarity hanging above us, only briefly, in the grand scheme of things. Seeing nothing, we reached out, held each others’ hands, and started to sing.

[This has been an installment of One-Word Torah. You can read the full series here.]