The Murrain of Beasts
Gustave Doré, 1866 · Exodus 9:2
The passage
For if thou refuse to let them go, and wilt hold them still,
Exodus 9:2
About this plate
A wide plain with the horizon set high, so most of the plate is ground. Cattle, horses and camels lie dead across it in heaps and singly, legs out, as far back as the eye goes. People are down among them: a man sitting with his head in his hand, a woman bent over the body of a beast, figures sprawled in the sand. On the right a group is leaving with bundles and jars on their heads and a child being carried. Birds cross the distant sky.
Dore refuses a centre. There is no single dead animal to look at and no one grieving face to settle on, just the same thing repeated to the back of the field. The eye keeps moving and keeps finding more.
The verse is only the condition, not the plague. For if thou refuse to let them go, and wilt hold them still. It is the sentence before the sentence, the moment the warning is still a warning. Everything in the picture is what came after those words were ignored.
The living in this plate are carrying things. The dead are all animals.
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