News reports have called it “a plague of biblical proportions.” But they’re not talking about the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Bible actually has very little to say about pandemics. About death from starvation or drought, yes. About death in war, oh my goodness yes. But very little about mass deaths from diseases – if I exclude the book of Revelation, which smacks its lips at the prospect of wiping out one-third of the world’s population in a single trumpet blast.
Rather, the “biblical plague” refers to locusts. Billions upon billions of flying grasshoppers that descend from the sky in clouds and eat the leaves off everything. Yes ma’am, even your prize peonies.
It won’t make The National, I’d guess, but right now great plagues of locusts are demolishing agricultural crops across east Africa, Somalia, Yemen, parts of Iran, Pakistan, and India.
Video clips show them swirling in the sky like an onrushing sandstorm. Darkening the sky. Swarming over plants so thickly they look like moving bark.
And this is happening in the midst of a global pandemic that tends to hit hardest among the poor, the malnourished, and the overcrowded, eating the meagre drops that those people depend on for the next year, in countries already ravaged by wars.
Ultimate consumer culture
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, a swarm of about 40 million desert locusts can consume as much food in one day as a city of 35,000 people. Swarms can cover several hundred square kilometres, with as many as 80 million adults per square kilometre.
They make the situation far worse than just twice as bad. It’s one disaster multiplied by another disaster – disaster squared, in mathematical terms.
There are so many locusts that rural villages have resorted to banging pots and pans hoping to drive the invaders away. Car accidents have been blamed on roads made slick by crushed locusts. Airlines have re-routed flights to avoid swarms of locusts.
Local governments have responded by spraying insecticides, of various kinds – from the ground, from airplanes, even from drones.
Nothing works.
There is only one good thing about plagues of locusts. They go in boom and bust cycles. Until this year, Kenya hadn’t had a major locust outbreak for 70 years; Somalia, about 30.
Mob mentality
And what are these fearsome critters, you ask. Basically, your ordinary garden variety grasshopper. The same thing that your kids hold in their hands, and squeal with delight when it leaps away.
Normally, grasshoppers are solitary, inoffensive creatures that browse quietly on leaves and grass.
But given the right climate conditions, they transform from Mr. Milquetoast to King Kong. They change colour. And choler. Biologists say they become gregarious. That means they cluster together. In human terms, they turn into mindless mobs.
Most grasshoppers can fly, if they have to. They’d rather hop, firing themselves into the distance by their powerful hind legs.
But a mob of locusts can fly 150 km in a day. They can fly across the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. They can fly over the mountain ranges of Afghanistan. In 1988, swarms from North Africa rode trade winds across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and South America.
The triggering factor seems to be climate. Changes in climate -- not the same thing as “climate change,” although the two may be related – where one wetter-then-normal season provides food for grasshopper populations to grow. A second wet season enables exponential growth. Humble grasshoppers become ravaging locusts.
“Let my people go!”
The four species prone to becoming plagues call the regions around the Indian Ocean their home. Of these, the desert locust is the most prolific.
It was almost certainly the desert locust that descended on Egypt in Moses’ time. Moses, you’ll recall, wanted to pressure the ruler of Egypt, the Pharaoh, to free his Hebrew slaves. “Let my people go,” Moses threatened, “or else!”
“Or else what?” retorted a contemptuous Pharaoh.
So, according to the Bible, Moses called up ten plagues. The Nile turned undrinkable. Dying frogs littered the streets. Lice and then flies made life miserable. Livestock died. People got boils. Hailstorms flattened crops. Darkness for three whole days.
The locusts were Moses’ eighth plague, chomping everything the hail hadn’t flattened.
The final plague, of course, was the death of every oldest child. That accomplished what even the locusts couldn’t – it set the slaves free.
Tragically, the current plague of locusts is likely to do the exact opposite. It will flush already impoverished peoples deeper down the drain of disease, conflict, and starvation.
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Copyright © 2020 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.
To send comments, to subscribe, or to unsubscribe, write jimt@quixotic.ca
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YOUR TURN
I’m suffering from mental lethargy these days. I know it’s a factor in grieving; I just didn’t realize how debilitating it can be. I slid right through what would have been our 60th wedding anniversary on July 2 – and didn’t realize I had done it until two days later, too late to go back and make it a special day.
And I forgot to send out Soft Edges the same day. Completely forgot. I will gather it up and send it in a day or two, so you’ll get two Soft Edges this coming week.
As for last week’s column, about donating blood to those who need it most, there weren’t many letters from you. As Steve Roney commented, “Donating blood is not controversial.”
“Good for Joan,” wrote Isabel Gibson. “A gerontologist I know laments that people have the ‘right’ to try any last-ditch effort to prolong at any cost, but we can't seem to find the money to let elderly couples who are in different levels of care stay together. Or the money to manage infection control in Ontario's nursing homes, for that matter. There should be money for both. There doesn't seem to be. So it's down to each of us to try not to take more than our fair share -- a notion that's sort of strange, not to say problematic, in our society.
“I don't know how I'll do when it comes my turn to turn down treatment. I hope I'll remember Joan.
“I haven't given blood for years. I'll start again.”
Sylvia McTavish has been both a blood donor and a volunteer at clinics: “My husband had to have blood following surgery a number of years ago, and he and another patient needed the same type, and Ray, having had blood with the first stage of his surgery, asked that the only available unit go to the other chap. No medals awarded, and both recovered.
“I do not understand why so many are reluctant to donate their blood, it is painless, doesn’t use up a lot of your valuable time, and serves a great purpose. My sister, who like your wife, Jim, had leukemia, needed blood and fortunately enough donors were there for her. Give life, people -- donate blood, yours could be the unit that saves a life.”
Norma Wible thought that “Your wife’s sacrifice was a tiny bit like Jesus’. Thank you for relating the story; here in the U.S. we are having a similar deficit. I used to give blood frequently, but after a horse accident followed by a splenectomy, it’s no longer possible to donate. Joan’s story, though reminds me of my having paid a homeless man for some yard work with a $100 bill. I found out later from the lady who ran the local homeless shelter that he had donated it there, because others needed it more.”
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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PROMOTION STUFF…
To use the links in this section, you’ll have to insert the necessary symbols. (This is to circumvent filters that think some of these links are spam.)
Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” is an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. http://wwwDOTchurchwebcanadaDOTca. He set up my webpage, and he doesn’t charge enough.
I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, wwwDOTtraditionaliconoclastDOTcom. She also runs beautiful pictures. Her Thanksgiving presentation on the old hymn, For the Beauty of the Earth, Is, well, beautiful -- https://www.traditionaliconoclast.com/2019/10/13/for/
Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatsoATgmailDOTcom (NB that’s “watso” not “watson”)
ALVA WOOD ARCHIVE
The late Alva Wood’s collection of satiric and sometimes wildly funny columns about a mythical village’s misadventures now have an archive (don’t ask how this happened) on my website: http://quixotic.ca/Alva-Wood-Archive. Feel free to browse all 550 columns.