In the passage on the plagues of Egypt, the reference is to Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger (eds.),

The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha , Revised Standard Version (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977 [1962]). Quotations are taken from p. 75. For a comparable attempt to 'naturalize’ myth from outside of the Bible, see Samuel Noah Kramer,

Sumerian Mythology , rev. edn. (New York: Harper & Row, 1961 [1st edn. 1944]).

The classic attempt not to replace but to reconcile a theological account of the plagues with a scientific account is that of the Jewish existentialist philosopher Martin Buber, for whom the believer, on the basis of faith, attributes to divine intervention what the believer acknowledges can be fully accounted for scientifically. See Buber,

Moses (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958 [1946]), especially pp. 60-8, 74-9. Buber is the Jewish counterpart to Rudolf Bultmann, considered in Chapter 2.

The classic work on finding science in myth is Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend,

Hamlet’s Mill (Boston: Gambit, 1969).

The work cited is Andrew Dixon White,

A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), abridged by Bruce Mazlish (New York: Free Press, 1965). For a balanced corrective, see John Hedley Brooke,

Science and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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