The Plague of Darkness Was Cut From God's Own Hiding Place

Moses lifted his hand toward the sky over Egypt, and nothing answered from the sun. The light did not dim the way it dims at dusk. It withdrew, as if pulled upward through a hole no eye could find, drawn back toward a place above the heavens that no mortal had ever been shown.

Then the dark came down.

It did not fall like night. Night is thin. A man can wave a torch through it and the torch wins. This came down as a weight, a substance with edges, and it settled over the fields and the river and the painted houses of Egypt the way water settles into a sealed jar. The first Egyptians to walk into it stopped walking. Their hands had touched something that should not have a surface.

They lit lamps. The flames stood in the bowls and gave nothing back, because the dark around each wick refused to be parted. A father reaching across a room for his own child closed his fingers on the dark itself and could not find the boy. The river was there, the granaries were there, the gods carved into the temple walls were there, and not one of them could be seen.

The Darkness Above the Throne

Two sages stood over the verse and argued about where the thing had come from, because a darkness that thick had to come from somewhere old.

Rabbi Judah traced it upward. There is a dark above the heavens, he said, a blackness in which God made His own hiding place. "He made darkness His covering," runs the line in the Psalm, "His pavilion round about Him." That is no ordinary shadow. It is the curtain God draws across Himself so that no creature can look in and live. From that supernal dark, Rabbi Judah said, a measure was cut loose and lowered onto a single nation.

Rabbi Nehemiah pointed down instead. He read another verse, "a land of gloom, like darkness itself," and he heard in it the floor of the world. The darkness over Egypt, he said, was hauled up out of Gehinnom, out of the pit where the wicked are laid and covered over with the dark, the way an earthen lid is set on an earthen vat. Whether it came from the highest place or the lowest, both sages agreed on one thing. It was not made for that night. It was older than the sun it was now smothering.

A Thing From Before the First Day

This was the darkness from the second verse of the world, the one that lay on the face of the deep before God ever said the word for light. It had been folded away when the light came. Now a fold of it was opened again.

So it had body. "He sent darkness, and it was dark," the verse says, and the sages leaned on that doubled phrase. Why say a darkness was dark? Because this darkness was a substance you could weigh. The Rabbis reached for a coin to measure it and could only say it was as thick as a Gordian denarius, a heavy minted disk from a far-off place, packed solid edge to edge. Egypt was breathing a coin's worth of the primordial deep into its own lungs.

The wicked know this dark already, the sages said, for it is the same dark drawn over them when they go down. Ask how you cover an earthen vat. Only with a lid of earthenware, a thing of the same kind as itself. So God covers the wicked who walk in darkness with the deep that is darkness, the very dark that lay upon the face of the deep at the beginning. A scoop of that lid had now been pressed over Egypt while it still breathed.

The Guardian Angels Said Yes

Before the dark was loosed, the Holy One turned to the guardian angels of Egypt, the very spirits set over that nation to defend it. They deserve to be struck with darkness, He told them.

Not one of them objected. They consented at once. "They did not defy His word," and the word here was the word against their own charge. The princes of Egypt signed the sentence on Egypt, because the nation had refused to bend to the authority of Heaven, and so Heaven's own officers would not bend to defend it.

The Darkness That Doubled Itself

And then the dark did something no one had ordered.

Picture a king whose slave has spat on his name. The king calls one of his men. "Go," he says, "and give him fifty lashes." The man takes the slave out and brings the whip down, and counts, and does not stop at fifty. He lays on a hundred. He adds fifty of his own, out of his own appetite for the work.

So it was with the darkness. The Holy One sent a measure, and the darkness, once it was let into the air of Egypt, added something of itself. It thickened past its order. Rabbi Acha said the Egyptians had refused to take the yoke of Heaven on themselves, and now an unyoked thing was loose in their streets, growing heavier than its sender had decreed.

For three days they could still shuffle and grope. Then the dark pressed down with its full added weight, and a man who had been sitting could not stand, and a man who had been standing could not sit. Egypt was pinned in place by something it could feel against its skin, a piece of the blackness in which God hides His face, lowered onto one kingdom and left there to swell.