There were prophecies in the sense of man prophesying, not God causing prophecy. The plagues of Egypt and the other miracles in Scripture are described as God’s action, as intervention and as deviation. Even though they are a law among the laws of nature, as researchers explain that blood was produced by contamination from carbon dioxide that was created as a result of tectonic plate movement because of the Santorini earthquake.
The Bible turns all the plagues—which are really a causal chain, predetermined in advance!!!!!—into the action of God and His intervention in nature, because the prophets see everything as the reality of God, even though it was done from the six days of creation.
In saying this I do not mean the Mishnah in Avot about the things that were fixed during the six days of creation, but rather the words of Maimonides in The Guide for the Perplexed, Part II, chapter 48:

“It is very clear that every newly occurring thing has a new proximate cause that brought it into being, and that cause has another cause, and so on until the matter terminates in the first cause of all things, namely, God’s will and desire. Therefore the prophets sometimes omit all those intermediate causes and attribute that particular newly occurring action to God, saying that He, exalted be He, did it.

All this is known, and both we and others among the people of truth have already spoken of it, and it is the view of all the people of our Torah.

After this introduction, hear what I shall explain in this chapter and consider it with special attention, more than your consideration of the other chapters of this treatise. What I shall explain to you is this:

Know that all the proximate causes from which what has occurred came about—there is no difference whether those causes are essential natural causes, voluntary causes, or accidental causes by way of happenstance.

And by voluntary causes I mean that the cause of that occurrence is a human choice; and even if the cause is the will of some animal among the animals, all of this is attributed to God, exalted be He, in the books of the prophets, and they say plainly regarding that action that God did it, or commanded it, or said it. And with regard to all these things there are used the language of saying, the language of speaking, the language of command, the language of calling, and the language of sending.

This is the matter I wished to draw attention to in this chapter. Since God, according to what has been established, is the one who aroused that will in that non-rational living creature, and He is the one who necessitated that choice in the rational living being, and He is the one who guided natural things according to their course, while chance is due to the goodness of natural things as has been explained, and most of it is shared by nature, choice, and will—therefore it necessarily follows, according to all this, that regarding what follows from those causes, one says that God commanded that it be done thus, or said that it should be thus.

I shall mention to you examples from all these, and from them you may judge all that I do not mention.

He said regarding things of nature that always occur, such as the melting of snow when the air becomes warm, and the death of the waves of the sea waters when the wind blows:
‘He sends forth His word and melts them.’
‘He spoke and caused a storm wind to stand, and it raised its waves.’
And He said regarding the falling of rain: ‘And I will command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it,’ etc.

And He said regarding things whose cause is human choices, such as the war of one people into whose hand another people is delivered, or a person stirred up to harm another person, even by a curse.
He said regarding the domination of the wicked Nebuchadnezzar and his armies: ‘I have commanded My consecrated ones, yes, I have called My mighty ones for My anger,’ and He said, ‘I will send him against a hypocritical nation.’
And regarding the passage of Shimei son of Gera it says, ‘For the Lord has said to him: Curse David.’

Regarding the rescue of righteous Joseph from prison it says, ‘The king sent and released him.’
And regarding the victory of Persia and Media over the Chaldeans it says, ‘And I will send foreigners to Babylon, and they shall winnow her.’
And regarding Elijah, of blessed memory, when God brought about that a woman should sustain him, it was said to him, ‘Behold, I have commanded a widow woman there to sustain you.’
And righteous Joseph said, ‘It was not you who sent me here, but God.’

And He said regarding things whose cause is the will of a living creature and its movement for its vital needs: ‘And the Lord said to the fish,’ since God is the one who aroused in it that will—not that He made it a prophet and showed it a vision.
So too it was said of the locusts that came in the days of Joel son of Pethuel: ‘For mighty is he that executes His word.’
So too it was said regarding the domination of wild beasts over the land of Edom at the time of its destruction in the days of Sennacherib: ‘And He cast the lot for them, and His hand divided it to them by line.’ Even though here the language of saying or command or sending is not mentioned, the meaning of the matter is similar and clear. From every similar case you should judge accordingly.

And He also said this regarding things that happen entirely by chance. Regarding Rebecca: ‘And let her be the wife of your master’s son, as the Lord has spoken.’
And regarding David and Jonathan: ‘Go, for the Lord has sent you away.’
And regarding Joseph: ‘And God sent me before you.’

Thus it has become clear to you how they speak of the arrangement of causes, how they were arranged—whether the causes were essential, accidental, voluntary, or acts of will—through these five expressions, namely:
command,
saying,
speech,
sending,
calling.
Know this and follow it everywhere according to its context, and many strange difficulties will be removed, and the truth of the matter will become clear to you in that place which seems far from the truth.

Up to here extends the discussion concerning prophecy and its parables and usages, and this is all that I have said to you on this matter in this treatise; and we shall proceed to other matters with the help of the Almighty.

Thus is completed this second part of The Guide for the Perplexed, and attached to it is the third part.”

I still don’t understand. Be more concrete and briefly explain what you mean.
Moses raises his hand and everything turns to blood—is that carbon dioxide? And the splitting of the sea is an earthquake? And “Sun, stand still at Gibeon”? This is not serious. And prophecies by prophets who foretell the future—this is their own initiative connecting to the Divine Presence? Is that serious?

I’m still not in writing shape like the Rabbi, who writes a whole world in one sentence. But I’ll try to explain briefly.

There are two approaches to the conflict over providence, prophecy, and miracles. Your solution to the conflict between religion and reality is to cancel these concepts and uproot them. By contrast, it is possible to give these concepts a new interpretation—an interpretation that draws from The Guide for the Perplexed as interpreted by Yeshayahu Leibowitz. Instead of canceling religion, reinterpret it. Instead of speaking about an active God, speak about an active human being. You insist that there were changes in the laws of nature at some times; I argue that one need not say so. One can say that these are laws of nature. All the reference to God is because the prophets relate to the laws of nature, given in the six days of creation, as the first cause. As Maimonides says in the Guide.

Moses raises his hand and everything turns to blood—is that carbon dioxide?
Yes. Not everything turns to blood. I reject the notion that every single thing in Egypt that bore the water molecule turned into blood. Everything in the Nile and its surroundings, and everything connected to it (and much of the produce of the land and its ponds are connected to it), became contaminated and turned red like blood.
The splitting of the sea is an earthquake? There is a strong connection between the earthquake in Greece and the drying up of Lake al-Bala for several hours, during which the Israelites crossed. And “Sun, stand still at Gibeon” can be interpreted in many ways, among them the interpretation that “a whole day” means a complete day, like an ordinary day in Tammuz—not that the order of creation changed. It’s only an interpretation. Obviously there are other interpretations.
Prophecy that reveals the future is not of the essence of prophecy. Rather, it is an intuition that arises in the prophetic vision. Ahithophel had the ability to foresee the future. That is not above nature.

Hello Rabbi,

Following up on the quotation brought above—
“This is the matter I wished to draw attention to in this chapter. Since God, according to what has been established, is the one who aroused that will in that non-rational living creature, and He is the one who necessitated that choice in the rational living being, and He is the one who guided natural things according to their course, while chance is due to the goodness of natural things as has been explained, and most of it is shared by nature, choice, and will—therefore it necessarily follows, according to all this, that regarding what follows from those causes, one says that God commanded that it be done thus, or said that it should be thus.”

Can this be understood to mean that Maimonides holds that man’s will and his (free) choice were also determined and planned in advance (similar to the laws of nature and the deviations from them)?
Where then is free choice?!

Thanks

Neriya, hello.
Even if we accept this interpretation of the plague of blood (and what about the other miracles?), when Moses raises his hand and exactly then a tectonic event occurs (which contaminates only the Egyptians’ water and not the Jews’), that is a miracle in every sense. That is not a natural explanation of a miracle. And now that same event itself causes the splitting of the sea months later, exactly when the people of Israel are standing at the water’s edge and Egypt is pursuing them. And the moment they pass, the waters return. Is that a natural explanation? If that is nature, then I do not know what a miracle is.
Maimonides’ explanation is unhelpful, because if the prophets know the laws of nature that were fixed from the six days of creation, then they have knowledge beyond accepted scientific knowledge (super-scientists). That is exactly prophecy, and I don’t see any gain from this “explanation.” Beyond that, I explained that nowadays even this does not happen. That is, the cessation of prophecy is still a substantial change in the world’s mode of operation (= a decline in the scientific level). So what have you gained?
I repeat again: an active human being does not explain prediction of the future.

Questioner,
I do not see any necessity to interpret the passage you quoted that way. But I haven’t delved into his words, because if it really was determined in advance, then there is no free choice. So that is probably not what Maimonides meant. And even if it is—I don’t agree with him.

To the questioner:
Maimonides says that everything has a cause, and if you go back and back you will discover that it is God’s will and desire. The subtle point here is that Maimonides says that God desired it, because the fact is He did not prevent the curse—but the whole beauty is that David is not bothered by it, and is not afraid of the curse. Maimonides is actually reinforcing providence, as the Sages said: “A person does not stub his finger below unless it is declared above.” In other words, the Holy One, blessed be He, sends “agents” to do His will regardless of their personal will. Think about it. Just as the raven brought food to Elijah the prophet, and just as the fish “swallowed” Jonah. Do you understand? All these are living examples of His providence, may He be blessed and exalted. And just as He protected the donkey when Balaam struck it 3 times. You can’t ignore all this! Good for you for asking!

To Neriya—regarding the blood: if the water had merely been contaminated with a blood-like color and so on, it would have been possible to filter it, and that is not something that happens in a moment. But look: the whole Nile was on fire, all the fish died, and the water was undrinkable.
What will you say about the plague of hail, with fire flaming within the hail?
By the way, in the splitting of the sea there was no low tide or high tide, because the sea literally opened and on both sides there was water that “froze,” as if there were glass holding it back. “And the waters were a wall to them on their right and on their left.”

How exactly would you filter it—are you serious?

Moshe,

If so, am I supposed to understand from you that human beings are just puppets living under the illusion that someone gave them free choice, but they were fooled… In any case everything is embedded and known in advance: the laws of nature, the deviations from them (miracles), the behavior of animals and plants… everything.
What a boring world…
It seems to me that something in this understanding is fundamentally mistaken. But I’m not worthy…

Hello Rabbi,

I can’t manage to understand Maimonides’ quotation any other way, since it ties together nature, will, and choice, such that they are all bound to God’s will from the days of creation.
If we assume that even only the deviations from natural law (the miracles) were programmed in advance during the six days of creation, then it follows that the entire set of possibilities for situations requiring miracles, from the day of creation onward, had to be programmed in advance.
And if we go one step further back and say that such situations are the product of the choice, decision, or will of an individual or a collective (a nation, for example), then it follows that indeed the entire infinite space of events, choices, and desires was imprinted in advance, and each person, according to his choice, only acts and is acted upon within the fabric of those pathways, in the sense of “everything is foreseen, yet permission is granted,” without any need for active divine providence in real time.

Is that what the poet meant?

To the questioner—if you didn’t understand, try reading it again with friends and you’ll see that everything will become clear.
In the choice to do commandments and transgressions—the Holy One, blessed be He, does not intervene for us. But He can intervene so that a car loses control in order to run over a specific person, while his friend who was standing next to him suffers no harm at all. He can send a human agent to give food to someone who needs food. Everything happens from Him, may He be blessed; He rules the world. Understand? He is the cause of all causes. He can see to it that a person lives without food, like Moses our Rabbi, who for 40 days did not eat or drink—how is that? The Holy One, blessed be He, “satisfied” his belly.
Joseph arrived in Egypt against his personal will, but it was God’s will. That is what Maimonides says.

Hello Rabbi.
You said: “Even if we accept this interpretation of the plague of blood (and what about the other miracles?), when Moses raises his hand and exactly then a tectonic event occurs (which contaminates only the Egyptians’ water and not the Jews’), that is a miracle in every sense. That is not a natural explanation of a miracle.”

It is enough if we say that the plagues are a phenomenon that does not change the laws of nature—then we have already advanced halfway. The question how Moses knows when and where, that is a question about prophecy, but it is not a question that requires a change in nature.
And regarding the question itself—“that is the power of prophecy.” I have no ability to understand the way in which Moses understood this through prophecy. Just as no human being has the ability to do so, since we are not prophets and no prophet exists. But that is the power of prophecy.

To Moshe and to the questioner:
It won’t help you to filter a liquid mixture—certainly not a compound. See the Nile burning because of dead fish. The fire flaming inside the hail was those same volcanic stones from Santorini {with lava}, which by the way were found around the Nile, and the storm blew them there. And “the waters were a wall” does not necessarily mean they stood like a pillar. The poetic description “the flowing waters congealed” highlights that liquid water stopped from reaching the Israelites and was at their sides, and this is a poetic expression. Like “the depths were congealed in the heart of the sea.” And if you want to be exacting from poetic language, the words “the waters were piled up” fit the theory of ebb and flow. In any case, you do not build worlds out of poetic metaphors.

Regarding the “interpretation” in the Guide—Maimonides explains that the prophets attribute everything to the Holy One, blessed be He, because He created it.
For example, they attribute the wisdom of a wise man to the Holy One, blessed be He, even though wisdom is only a human result, of study and persistence, and all this is because they look at life differently: the ability to acquire wisdom comes from God and is His creation, so it is from Him. Shimei son of Gera chose to curse David out of his own personal choice. Why does David say, “God said to him, Curse”? Because God gave him the free choice to curse. And David sees before him only the first cause, which is God. In other words he says: “God gave him the ability to curse; I will not prevent him” {for reasons known to Him}. “God said to him, Curse” is a fact, not a rationale. Later David asks Solomon to avenge him.

Neriya, apparently you didn’t understand me.
It is indeed a deviation from the laws of nature, because it is not enough for Moses to know by prophecy that there will be blood or that the sea will split. It also has to happen at exactly the right time.

The timing and Moses’ knowledge are not a discussion about laws of nature that did not depart from their order, but a discussion about the way of prophecy. The knowledge of the “right time” is something that can be understood only within the framework of prophecy. But the order of creation was not overturned. At most you can say that the laws were maneuvered, but not that they were changed.

We’re grinding water.
I’m not talking about knowledge of the right time, because I’m not dealing with the question of how Moses knew. I’m dealing with the question of why it happened exactly when it had to happen.
“Maneuvering” the laws of nature is a miracle in every sense. That maneuvering means that in the given circumstances, according to the laws, one thing should have happened, and the Holy One, blessed be He, “maneuvered” things so that something else came out. That is intervention and a deviation from the laws of nature—that is, a full and absolute miracle. The expression “maneuvering” has no meaning except laundering miracles.

Neriya—you’re stuck for no reason.

It is possible to filter cloudy water.

By the way, they investigated the tectonic plates with advanced instruments and discovered that nothing moved there. What do you have to say?
They found volcanic stones around the Nile? That fell on people in the cities and on their animals, and if they really were stones the houses would have been destroyed and the people inside them would have died and burned. But the plague of hail did not burn houses or destroy them.
Do you know how the plague of boils was done? By throwing a little soot into the sky. Isn’t that a miracle against nature? What kind of maneuvering is this nonsense?

Seemingly, the answer according to Neriya’s approach—which is well known among many educated theologians (especially in the Christian world, though not only there) and was very widespread among Bible scholars in the early twentieth century (for example Tur-Sinai in his book Language and Scripture, and Martin Buber in his natural description of the splitting of the Red Sea and the revelation at Sinai, and, in a very different vein, Immanuel Velikovsky in Worlds in Collision)—the answer is that there was no “right time.” Moses was shown in prophecy that a sequence of nature-shattering events was about to happen—if you like, he even picked up on it when it began, like some Indian highly sensitive to phenomena—and the events indeed were natural. All Moses did was adapt the people of Israel and their movement according to what was revealed to him would happen. For example: he knew—let us say—that the darkness that came from the volcanic cloud of Santorini (today they speak of two giant eruptions 200 years apart, and we are talking now about the second one, around 1300 BCE) would later also produce aftershocks, one of which would create a great tsunami that, together with the date of the tides, would produce a serious drying-up of the Red Sea. And so he directed—even through prophecy—the people of Israel to go three days into the wilderness and seemingly waste time, in order to arrive at the correct—the natural—moment of the critical low tide in the Red Sea and thus cross it. Something like this I already wrote in a question about the Exodus in archaeology, that the miracle of the solar eclipse = “Sun, stand still at Gibeon” was in its timing during the battle, and Joshua’s foreknowledge of it is what led him to proclaim before the people: “Sun, stand still in Gibeon,” and thereby stop the panic caused by the event among Israel. The result: only the Amorites fled in fear, thinking that God was fighting for Israel. It is known from Greek wars that a solar eclipse during battle sowed fear and panic, once causing the sides to make immediate peace (concluding that this was what the gods wanted), and in another case causing one side to flee the battle and lose. All this is described at length in an article in the latest issue of Beit Mikra.

To Moshe—there is no need to understand the biblical description specifically in a legendary way: “and fire flaming within the hail” simply means very serious lightning that set the fields on fire together with the blazing hail. Also, when Pharaoh says that “the voices of God should cease” in the plague of hail, he means thunder. These are simple things, there is no need to get tangled up.

Addition: it seems that along the lines of what I wrote above, following Neriya’s suggestion, the Baal Shem Tov wrote: “And the sea returned to its strength toward morning”—a story about the Baal Shem Tov, of blessed memory, that someone came to him and wanted to ask him, since he had studied natural science and philosophy, and according to those disciplines it came out that at the very time when the sea split before the Israelites, the sea needed to split then according to the nature of the sea itself; if so, what is all the noise about the miracle of the splitting of the sea that we believe in? And with this difficulty he went about in great confusion and traveled to the Baal Shem Tov. When he arrived there, before he asked the Baal Shem Tov, the Baal Shem Tov went to the synagogue and ordered the townspeople to gather, and he preached before them: since there are fools and heretics in the world who are troubled by this as above, they have eyes but do not see, for it is written, ‘In the beginning God created…’—‘God’ has the numerical value of ‘nature,’ and nature itself too was created by the Holy One, blessed be He. And this is what our Sages expounded: ‘to its strength’—‘to its condition,’ teaching that the Holy One, blessed be He, made a condition with creation, etc. And from then the Holy One, blessed be He, embedded in the nature of the sea that it would split before the Israelites at that time. The miracle is therefore even greater, because at the beginning of the creation of the world the Holy One, blessed be He, made this nature for the sake of Israel, and ‘in the beginning,’ for Israel who are called ‘first,’ this nature was created. And if Israel had not needed this miracle, the Holy One, blessed be He, would not have made this nature in the sea.” And that is enough for the wise.