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According to the PA papers, the Israeli-Jerusalem rat is:
1. Immune to rat poison
2. Aggressive and larger than usual
3. Unafraid of cats and able to scare them away
4. Highly fertile, with females giving birth to 140 young rats a year, four times the normal average
5. Highly selective, as Jewish residents of Jerusalem apparently are not affected by these rats.
“[Israeli] settlers have been bringing chests filled with rats and releasing them in the Old City’s [Arab] neighborhoods; they breed and have become a major curse… the [Arab] residents’ efforts to counter this infestation have failed, especially since cats run away from these rats because of their size and ferocity… All of the conventional efforts to kill them have not succeeded, because they seem to be immune to poison and they breed in the sewers. It is known that this female rat gives birth seven times a year, each time giving birth to 20 babies, which compels Jerusalem’s [Arabs] today to face the dangers of settlement and the infestation of rats…” (Arutz 7)
Can you believe this?
Plague, rats and the Bible again: a postscript
W M S Russell
Department of Sociology, University of Reading, Whiteknights, PO Box 218, Reading RG6 6AA, Berkshire, UK
In connection with Freemon's diagnosis of the `plague' of the Philistines as bubonic plague,1 two further points have occurred to me as needing to be mentioned. He showed that black rats and their fleas were certainly present in the Near East in time for the epidemic. But there is no mention of rats in the Biblical account, only of crop pests, `mice that mar the land' (1 Samuel, 6:5).2 In any case, nobody then could possibly have known of rat or flea vectors. The first person known to have connected dead rats with human plague deaths was the Chinese poet Shih Tao-nan (CE 1765-1792).3
Shrewsbury diagnosed the epidemic as bacillary dysentery, which can lead to piles—the `emerods' (haemorrhoids) of the Authorized Version, translating the Hebrew word opalim.4 The biblical concordance leads one to Psalms 78:66, where the Lord `smote his enemies in the hinder parts'.5
Freemon states that `the "emerods" of the King James Bible appear in all modern translations as tumours'.1 But Josephus diagnosed the disease as dysentery (Antiquities 6:1).5