These forty, plus the notional two hundred plagues inflicted at the Red Sea, make two hundred and forty.
Early rabbis are quoted revelling, with a unself-conscious pathos, in plagues inflicted on the Egyptians, magnifying oppressors' suffering like a wounded boy fantasizing about what his father should do to a bully.
A cynic might even see the preponderance of age-related illnesses that the young are beginning to exhibit - obesity, hypotension and diabetes - as plagues inflicted on them by the physical constraints imposed by an ageing society.
He described gruesome wounds that bubonic plague had inflicted on his grandmother Martha Lemon.
And when a friend tried to convince Baskerville that the plague of flies inflicted on Egypt was proof of the existence of God, Baskerville argued that all that it proved was a shortage of spiders.
He has inflicted plagues in the form of Aids, Sars and H5N1.
And the Black Death felled at least 30 percent of those it inflicted, whereas a modern plague in India that struck Bombay in 1904, before the advent of antibiotics, killed only 3 percent of its victims.
These plagues aim to inflict psychological rather than physical harm.
Lying on my gurney, I decided that I'd moved on from Christian docudrama to the plague portion of the Passover Seder, when we dip our pinkies into wine to represent the hideous disasters the good Lord inflicted on the Egyptians: locusts, frogs, pestilence, infertility, preëclampsia, brain damage.
His book inflicts a plague of vipers upon the head of Bill Peterson, the Ada district attorney who led both these investigations and is still in office.
Both are pretty ugly bruisers in terms of market size, and in the middle are book publishers who must be wondering what they have done to provoke the deities into inflicting a plague on paid-for text.
