ColossiansOne

body · 3 claims

Plague

Epidemic disease as an armed god with a bow — the oldest and most consistent piece of imagery in the corpus.

PestilenceThe arrows

Plague is not attributed to small spirits. It goes to gods, and the same picture recurs across unrelated languages: a divine archer whose arrows are the disease. Resheph shoots plague in the Ugaritic material and survives into the Hebrew Bible as a common noun for pestilence; Nergal rules both plague and the underworld; Apollo opens the Iliad shooting plague into the Greek camp for nine days.

The grammar is the point. A disease that takes a household is a spirit; a disease that takes a city is a god, and one who is being paid for something.

Oldest first

Who was blamed, and by which text?

Each card is one text making one attribution, in its own framing. Reading down the column is a transmission history rather than a set of independent witnesses — and where a claim carries a grading, that grading is about how well it is grounded in the passage it cites, nothing more.

Resheph

The Baal Cycle (Ugaritic Tablets) · c. 1400-1200 BCE

Plague god of the Levant, armed with a bow; his name persists in the Hebrew Bible as a word for pestilence and burning fever.

Canaanite
Historical depiction of Nergal, Mesopotamian

Nergal

The Myth of Anzu · c. 1500-1000 BCE

Lord of the underworld and of epidemic disease, whose arrival in a city is its outbreak.

Mesopotamian

The destroying angel

Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon · c. 900–100 BCE

A single agent, sent and then stopped by command, kills through the camp and the city — the same act attributed to an obedient messenger rather than to a hostile power.

2 Samuel 24:16

Which texts make these claims?

Oldest first. The distance between the earliest and the latest is the thing worth looking at: a claim made in an incantation four thousand years ago and one made in a paperback in 1973 are different kinds of evidence about the same symptom.

All afflictions