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The Plague of Darkness Let Israel Bury Its Dead in Secret

Three days of total darkness fell over Egypt. The Targum says God used that blackness to let the Israelites bury their wicked dead before Pharaoh could see.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. What Egypt Saw and What Israel Did
  2. The Wicked Who Had Died
  3. What Darkness Reveals About Light
  4. The Privacy of Grief

What Egypt Saw and What Israel Did

The ninth plague settled over Egypt like a physical weight. No one could see the person beside them. No one rose from where they sat. The darkness of Exodus 10 is described in the Hebrew Bible as something that could be felt, a darkness with mass and pressure, and it lasted three days. The usual reading sees this as punishment, a taste of helplessness for an empire that had spent generations making others helpless.

Targum Jonathan on Exodus 10, the Aramaic paraphrase shaped in Palestine between the second and seventh centuries CE, does not contradict that reading. But it adds another dimension entirely. The darkness served purposes inside the Israelite camp that had nothing to do with Pharaoh.

The Wicked Who Had Died

Not every Israelite was righteous. The Targum acknowledges this plainly. Some had died during the plague period, whether from the same causes that struck Egypt or from their own failures. The dead needed burial. The living needed to bury them without displaying the community's losses to its oppressors.

The darkness gave them three days of privacy. No Egyptian could watch. No taskmasters could count. No informant could report to Pharaoh how many Hebrews had been taken by the same disasters that were striking Egypt. Israel buried its dead without spectacle, without shame, without the particular cruelty of being forced to grieve in public before the people who had caused the conditions of the grief.

The Israelites had light in their dwellings throughout the three days (Exodus 10:23). The Targum specifies that this light had two purposes. The first was for the burials. The second was for Torah study. While Egypt sat in impenetrable blackout, the righteous in Israel spent the days learning. The darkness that pressed Egypt flat created, on the other side of an invisible boundary, a space for mourning and for thinking.

What Darkness Reveals About Light

The Kalach Pitchei Chokhmah, a Kabbalistic work working from principles about vessels and their capacity to hold divine light, provides a framework for understanding why some containers hold more light than others. The closer a vessel stands to darkness, the less light it can sustain. This is not a moral judgment against the vessel but a description of spiritual physics. Pharaoh's court was saturated with darkness, having chosen it repeatedly, and so the plague simply made visible what had already been true.

Israel's light in the dwellings during the plague follows the same logic in reverse. A people who had chosen, however imperfectly, the discipline of Torah and the practice of covenant, retained access to illumination that the darkness could not reach. The wicked among them had still died. The community was not perfectly righteous. But the tradition distinguishes between a community that fails sometimes and a regime that has organized itself around cruelty, and it gives each what it has prepared for itself.

The Privacy of Grief

The Targum's insistence on burial privacy is not only about protecting Israel from Pharaoh's observation. It is also a statement about how grief belongs to a community rather than to its observers. For decades the Hebrews had been made to suffer visibly, their labor displayed, their bodies measurable, their children thrown into the Nile where Pharaoh could see the decree executed. The plague of darkness reverses this for three days. What happens inside Israel's camps during those seventy-two hours belongs to Israel alone.

The tenth plague is coming. Every household in Egypt will lose someone. Pharaoh will watch his country grieve in the open. The Israelites have already buried their dead in the dark, privately, and moved on. By the time the final night arrives, they will be ready to move because they have already said their farewells.

DarknessPlaguesIsraelEgyptExodusDeathMidrash AggadahTargum Jonathan
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From the tradition

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The texts this telling draws on, in full. Open a card to read inline, or expand it for a wider, quieter read.

Targum Jonathan on Exodus 2Targum Jonathan

The Torah tells us that Moses was born, hidden, found by Pharaoh's daughter, and eventually fled to Midian. Targum Jonathan fills in the gaps with miracles, secret identities, and a ten-year imprisonment the Bible never mentions.

Moses' mother Jochebed gets an astonishing backstory. Amram had divorced her "on account of the decree of Pharaoh", he refused to bring children into a world where they would be killed. But he returned to her, and "she was the daughter of a hundred and thirty years when he returned to her; but a miracle was wrought in her, and she returned unto youth." Her body reversed its aging entirely. The Targum then explains the timeline: Moses was born "at the end of six months," and Jochebed hid him for three months, "which made the number nine", a full-term pregnancy compressed into six months, then concealed for three.

When Pharaoh's daughter comes to the river, the Targum provides a reason not found in the Torah. "The Word of the Lord sent forth a burning sore and inflammation of the flesh upon the land of Egypt." She came to the Nile to find relief from a plague. When her handmaids touched the ark containing baby Moses, "they were immediately healed of the burning and inflammation." The child was already performing miracles.

Moses' killing of the Egyptian taskmaster receives a remarkable justification. Before striking, Moses "considered in the wisdom of his mind, and understood that in no generation would there arise a proselyte from that Egyptian man, and that none of his children's children would ever be converted." He looked into the future, every future generation. And saw no righteous descendant. Only then did he act. The Targum also names the two quarreling Hebrews: Dathan and Abiram, the same troublemakers who would later rebel against Moses in the wilderness (Numbers 16).

The Midian section is where the Targum diverges most dramatically from the Torah. When Moses arrives at Reuel's house, here identified as Jethro's father, the girls' grandfather rather than their father, things take a dark turn. "When Reuel knew that Moses had fled from before Pharaoh he cast him into a pit." Moses was imprisoned for ten years. Zipporah, Reuel's granddaughter, "maintained him with food, secretly, for the time of ten years; and at the end of ten years brought him out of the pit."

What follows is one of the most mystical passages in all of Targum Jonathan. Moses entered Reuel's chamber, "gave thanks and prayed before the Lord, who by him would work miracles and mighty acts. And there was shown to him the Rod which was created between the evenings", that is, at twilight on the sixth day of Creation, one of the miraculous objects God prepared before the first Sabbath. On this Rod "was engraven and set forth the Great and Glorious Name", the Shem HaMeforash, the Ineffable Name of God. This was the rod "with which he was to do the wonders in Egypt, and to divide the Sea of Reeds, and to bring forth water from the rock." The Rod was fixed immovably in the chamber. Moses "stretched forth his hand at once and took it", effortlessly, where presumably others had failed.

The chapter's final verses contain a horrifying detail. The Torah says Pharaoh died and the Israelites cried out. The Targum says "the king of Egypt was struck with disease, and he commanded to kill the firstborn of the sons of Israel, that he might bathe himself in their blood." He was murdering children as medicine. And God's response came because "the repentance was revealed before Him which they exercised in concealment, so as that no man knew that of his companion", each Israelite repented secretly, privately, not knowing their neighbor was doing the same.

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Kalach Pitchei Chokhmah 47:34Kalach Pitchei Chokhmah

In the ancient wisdom of the Kalach Pitchei Chokhmah, a profound answer emerges.

Think of it like this: Imagine a series of containers, each designed to hold light. But some are closer to a source of darkness, a source of what we might call "evil." The closer a container is to that darkness, the less light it can truly hold.

The Kalach Pitchei Chokhmah, a Kabbalistic text whose title translates roughly to "Key to the Gates of Wisdom," suggests that the capacity of a vessel – and here, "vessel" means anything that can receive or hold something, like a sefirah (a divine emanation) or even ourselves – to receive light is directly related to its distance from evil. But what does that mean, "distance from evil?"

The text explains that it all boils down to the "maintenance of evil." The lowest level, the one closest to the source, is the one that actively maintains it. The level above it, while not directly responsible, is still near enough to be affected. And so on, up the ladder.

Now, in Kabbalah, we often talk about the sefirot (singular: sefirah), the ten emanations of God's divine energy. Think of them as attributes or aspects of the Divine, each playing a crucial role in creation. So, in this context, each sefirah has a certain capacity to receive light.

The text is telling us that the higher the sefirah is, the more distant it is from the lowest sefirah which is the one that maintains the darkness, the greater its capacity to receive light. It’s a graduated scale. The further away, the purer the vessel.

So, what does it mean to maintain evil? It doesn't necessarily mean actively causing harm. Sometimes, it means clinging to negativity, resisting growth, or refusing to let go of limiting beliefs. And the closer we are to those things, the more difficult it becomes to truly shine.

The key takeaway here is the idea of cleansing. "The greatness of the lights in the vessels," the verse says, "corresponds to the degree to which they have been cleansed." The more purified a vessel is, the more radiant it becomes. The more we purify ourselves, the more light we are able to hold and emanate into the world.

This isn't just some abstract concept. It has profound implications for our lives. It suggests that we have the power to increase our capacity for light by distancing ourselves from negativity and actively pursuing purification. By working on our own inner vessels, we can become brighter beacons in a world that desperately needs light.

And isn't that something worth striving for?

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