What were the properties of the Nile blood?

Question

When the Nile River turned to blood, as described in Exodus 7:20, what sort of blood was it? Was it human? If so, what blood types comprised it? Exodus 7:18 might be interpreted to mean that the blood was that of the river fish, but this isn't stated directly.

Answer 1

So far as I know, there is no independent evidence to support the account of the plagues suffered by the Egyptians as described in the Book of Exodus.

On the one hand, the books of the Bible are accepted by many followers of particular Christian denominations as the divinely inspired word of God. For these people, faith alone enables them to accept the accounts of events in the past as described in the Bible as the unassailable truth.

On the other hand, historians are responsible for using critical thinking in an attempt to reconstruct an accurate picture of the events of the past, an accurate picture based on different forms of vetted evidence. As this indicates, any potential evidence of past events cannot be accepted purely at face value (nor should it be dismissed out of hand).

The books contained in the Bible, from the perspective of objective historians, cannot be completely relied upon for accurate accounts of past events. They undoubtedly contain reliable information, but they also contain distortions, omissions, and falsehoods designed to satisfy the different agendas of the different authors of these books. It's important to understand that, at least before Herodotus and Thucydides, the concept of objectivity - accurately describing historical events from a disinterested stand point - was all but unknown in the Ancient World.

The purpose of nearly all accounts of 'historical' events produced in the Ancient World before the age of Classical Greece had, as their goal, the celebration of a particular ruler and / or a particular people. The books of the Old Testament contained with in the Bible are a history of the Jewish people, written by Jewish people intended to celebrate the Jewish people. Much of what is written is not about what actually did happen (about which we are largely in the dark) but what should have happened in terms of showing the Jewish people in the best light. In this respect, the books of the Old Testament are no different from what was written by scribes in the employment of the rulers of, say, the Pharaohs of Egypt or the Kings of Assyria, etc...

With regards to the plagues sent by the God of the Hebrews to punish the Egyptians, even if we accept the accounts as accurate, they present some serious problems. I'll name but two.

First, if the first-born of every Egyptian family was killed in a single night, this would mean the death of a major proportion of the Egyptian population - an entire generation wiped out. How is, then, that with all of the records left to us by the Egyptians themselves and by foreign historians (such as Herodotus), no mention is made of this enormous catastrophe? We have records from the Ancient World of devastating floods, famines, and other forms of plagues. Why, then, are the records silent about a such an unprecedented event?

Second, from what we know about rulers in the Ancient World, including the Pharaohs of Egypt (who proclaimed that they were living gods), the reaction to a series of horrific, devastating plagues for which the Hebrew 'slaves' claimed responsibility is more than a little predictable. Rather than allow the Hebrews to leave the Kingdom of Egypt in peace, any and every Pharaoh would most certainly have taken revenge by killing every last Hebrew. Indeed, the fathers who lost their first-born to the plagues brought on by the Hebrews wouldn't have waited for the Pharaoh to take action. They themselves would have descended upon the Hebrews and vented their rage as would any aggrieved parent whose child had been murdered.