JRSM >
Volume 99, Number 8 >
Pp. 387
Letters |
Quartermans, Welwyn, Hertfordshire AL6 0SP, UK
In a letter to this journal1 I suggested that the ‘plague of the Philistines’ (I Samuel chapters 5 and 6) was the first documented account of bubonic plague, and remain of that view despite the recent correspondence of Russell.2,3 He suggests the plague referred to as ‘emerods’ was dysentery complicated by piles. Russell's view stems from Whiston's translation4 of Josephus's history of these events as dysentery. However, elsewhere Whiston translates the same word as distemper.
The original Hebrew text uses two words used to describe the plague's pathology namely ‘techorim’ (tumour) and ‘ophel’ (boil).5 The King James version translates both words as emerods, and the New International version translates both as ‘tumour’.
The Septuagint translation made in Alexandria in third century BCE from Hebrew into Greek, and St Jerome's translation of this Greek text into Latin, both expand the original Hebrew by stating the tumours were in the groin. (Bubo is derived from the Greek word for groin.) It therefore seems that the 72 Hebrew scholars who made the Septuagint translation were thinking in terms of Bubonic plague—this seems to me to be a sounder basis for a diagnosis than Josephus!
Footnotes
Competing interests None declared.
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