Pestilence. This is one of those antiquated words that dystopian novelists and heavy metal bands like to throw around; but do we know — really know — what the word means?
The Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (more affectionately referred to as the Strong’s Concordance) informs us that pestilence comes from the Hebrew word deber [Strong’s 1698: דֶּבֶר] meaning, “a pandemic occurrence of sickness that causes widespread death, often with the associative meaning of judgment from God.”
The definition specifies three aspects that must be present for a disease to be categorized as pestilence:
• pandemic sickness
• widespread death
• judgment from God
With this definition in mind, does COVID-19 fit the bill?
A pandemic is an illness prevalent over a whole country or the world. So far, looks like COVID is in the running. Next, has the coronavirus resulted in widespread death? Well, now we are already into a gray area. One must navigate through a minefield of online data, laden with ever-changing “facts” and confirmation bias to even find a reliable or consistently reported d ...