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and come into thine house, and into thy bedchamber, and upon thy bed,
and into the house of thy servants, and upon thy people, and into thine
ovens, and into thy kneadingtroughs. (Exodus, 8:2-3)
And the LORD said unto Moses, "Say unto Aaron, Stretch out thy rod, and
smite the dust of the land, that it may become lice throughout all the land
of Egypt." (Exodus, 8:16)
And the locusts went up over all the land of Egypt, and rested in all the co-
asts of Egypt: very grievous [were they]; before them there were no such
locusts as they, neither after them shall be such. (Exodus, 10:14)
Then the magicians said unto Pharaoh, This [is] the finger of God: and Pha-
raoh's heart was hardened, and he hearkened not unto them; as the LORD
had said. (Exodus, 8:19)
Awful disasters kept happening to Fir’awn and his close circle. Some of
these disasters were caused by the objects worshipped as gods by the ido-
latrous people. For example, the River Nile and frogs were sacred for them
and had been deified by them. As they expected guidance from their
"gods" and called for their help, Allah punished them through their own
"gods" so that they could see their mistakes and the plain fact that they
actually had no power at all.
According to interpreters of the Old Testament, the "blood" was the tur-
ning of the River Nile into blood. This was explained as a metaphor for the
River Nile’s turning solid red. According to an interpretation, what gave the
river this colour was a type of bacteria.
The Nile was the main source of life for the Egyptians. Any harm done
to this source could mean death for the whole of Egypt. If the bacteria had
covered the River Nile so fully as to turn it red, this would cause every li-
ving thing using this water to be infected by these bacteria.
Recent explanations of the cause for the red colouring of water has fa-
voured protozoan, zooplankton, both salt - and fresh - water algal (phytop-
lankton) blooms, and dinoflagellates. All of these various blooms - plant,
fungal or protozoan - deoxygenate water and produce noxious toxins for
both fish and frogs.
Citing the Exodus account in the Bible, Patricia A. Tester of the National
Marine Fisheries Service, writing in the Annals of the New York Academy
of Science, noted that while fewer than fifty out of approximately 5,000
Harun Yahya
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