As we enter Passover I am fondly remembering the glee with which the kids recited the 10 plagues at the annual Seder table. That part of the service is accompanied by dipping your finger into red wine and, if you’re 8 years old, wildly flinging the drops across the table instead of gently letting them fall onto your plate. Washer women (well, people) of the world unite!

Remembering the plagues that befell the Egyptians who held the Israelites in slavery – water turning to blood, frogs, lice, flies, livestock pestilence, boils, hail, locusts, darkness and the killing of firstborn children – is an important part of Jewish tradition, mindful of suffering and existential threat across history, as well as the belief that G-d’s protection will eventually come through.

I was reminded of the plagues when I ran across new research that claims to affect the breeding and feeding behavior of disease-transmitting mosquitos, by blasting them with techno music. Apparently the dub beats interfere with wing beat synchronisation of the mating couples necessary for success. Wouldn’t that be a grand alternative to chemical eradication? The video in the link above shows the lab work, short and fascinating.

Do those plague narratives, faithfully handed down from generation to generation, have any grounding in fact? Archeological research offers some options.

• The first suggests that the volcanic eruption on the island of Santorini in the south of Greece around 1620-1600 BCE sent ashes to Egypt. They included the mineral Cinnabar which would have turned the rivers red. The generated acidity would have made the frogs jump to their death. Insects buried larvae in dead bodies which increased the noxious insect population. Acid rain could have caused the boils on people, poisoning the grass and in turn the livestock, with hail increasing humidity that fostered locust breeding. Volcanic eruption would also account for the many days of darkness that we hear about.

• The second theory suggests red algae as the causal culprit.

“Red algae could have sucked oxygen out of Egypt’s waterways, killed the fish and turned the water red. Just as in the volcano theory, frogs then leapt out looking for food, and died. Without frogs to eat the insects, the pests proliferated and feasted on corpses, a feeding frenzy for flies and locusts. The paper argued that the lice could have been a type of insect called culicoides, which can carry two diseases that could explain the livestock deaths: African horse sickness and Bluetongue. The boils on humans could have been caused by glanders, an airborne bacterial disease spread by flies or tainted meat.”

In this theory the darkness was coincidentally caused by a sandstorm. It would have left the crops moldy, which could have produced airborne toxins that might explain widespread childhood death.

• The third claim concerns climate change. Research on stalagmites —elongated mineral deposits that form out of calcium in precipitation — suggested that there had been a dry period towards the end of the rule of Pharaoh Ramses II. That change would have dried up the Nile and significantly slowed down the flow of water, ideal conditions for red algae to develop.

The central religious message of punishment for the oppressors’ reluctance to abandon slavery does, of course, not care about scientific models. The core insight that people cling to their power, their advantage, their “traditional rights,” at the expense of those they harm, exploit, abandon is a universal one, true for us today as much as for those 3500 years ago. The desire to believe that the harm that befell the Egyptians was G-d given punishment is, in my view, our clinging to the ideal of a “just world.” I’m convinced it takes our own actions to ensure that justice is restored – and this year we might as well start by eliminating a source of enacted racism and reluctance to yield power: the Filibuster. 11th plague, be gone!

Music today is one of the most transcendental movements I know, written in Bartok’s last year of life while dying from leukemia. It has insects chirping in the middle, thus the connection, but it also radiates a kind of grounding that religious tradition can install.

Chag Sameach to all who celebrate Pesach, Happy Easter to others and Happy Spring to the rest!

Photographs are of butterflies rather than creepy crawlers. I assume you’ll thank me.