‘A Plague Broke out Among Them’: Reflections on the Bible and the Pandemic

In this theological essay, Joel Kaminsky, a scholar of the Bible and professor of Jewish studies at Smith College, compares the COVID-19 crisis to Biblical accounts of natural disasters in order to magnify narrative-based approaches to pandemic management. He focuses on the question of responsibility, asking how the reflexivity exhibited in the Hebrew Bible is relevant to the pandemic. Although the “previous two or three centuries” (Kaminksy 247) have highlighted technological and scientific innovation, Kaminsky asserts that texts like Bible can help bridge the gap between specialist expertise and public safety. He interprets Biblical narratives that assign blame after seemingly uncontrollable events as depicting how death can be an opportunity for introspection that incites survivors to rebuild and empower themselves. Notorious for linking personal failings to mass destruction, there are nevertheless moments when the Bible sanctions blaming divinity – particularly in cases where no sin can be identified, reflecting how the pandemic revealed structural failures and social inequality. Although the COVID response valorized the sciences, Kaminsky suggests that non-scientific solutions are essential, acknowledging that academic expertise is often “unlikely to persuade many … non-scientists to accept this technocratic assessment” (Kaminsky 257). By comparing Biblical disaster with the pandemic, Kaminsky puts forth a strategy for recovery that “appeals to the imaginative, poetic, and mythic sides of our psyches,” and that therefore may motivate “many unmoved by scientific evidence alone to act in more responsible ways” (Kaminsky 258).