Exodus 9:3-6 (the fifth plague, the murrain — the question's "sixth" is wrong) says "all the cattle of Egypt died." Three verses later at Exodus 9:19, God is warning Egyptians to bring their cattle and servants indoors because hail is coming and what's left in the field will die. So either "all" didn't mean all, or there's a narrative continuity problem between the fifth and seventh plagues.
Proposed answers
People have answered this in several ways; GEBible presents them as equal peers.
3behold, Yahweh’s hand is on your livestock which are in the field, on the horses, on the donkeys, on the camels, on the herds, and on the flocks with a very grievous pestilence.4Yahweh will make a distinction between the livestock of Israel and the livestock of Egypt; and nothing shall die of all that belongs to the children of Israel.” ’ ”5Yahweh appointed a set time, saying, “Tomorrow Yahweh shall do this thing in the land.”6Yahweh did that thing on the next day; and all the livestock of Egypt died, but of the livestock of the children of Israel, not one died.
19Now therefore command that all of your livestock and all that you have in the field be brought into shelter. The hail will come down on every man and animal that is found in the field, and isn’t brought home, and they will die.” ’ ”
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement— a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
Note first a factual error in the question's framing: the death of the livestock is the fifth plague (the murrain, dever), not the sixth. The sixth plague is the boils (Exodus 9:8-12). With that corrected, the tension is genuine. Exodus 9:6 reports that after the murrain "all the cattle of Egypt died" (וַיָּמָת כֹּל מִקְנֵה מִצְרָיִם), yet at Exodus 9:19, in the run-up to the seventh plague (hail), YHWH warns the Egyptians to bring in "thy cattle, and all that thou hast in the field," since the hail will kill man and beast left outdoors. If all the cattle had already died, there would be none left to shelter from the hail.
The principal harmonization is the hyperbolic-kol defense, run by Archer, Stuart, and Kaiser and rooted in Keil-Delitzsch. Biblical Hebrew regularly uses כֹּל (kol, "all") in a rhetorical, non-exhaustive sense — comparable to "all Judea" going out to John (Mark 1:5) or "all the world" being taxed (Luke 2:1). Crucially, this is not an ad hoc appeal here, because Exodus 9:3 expressly restricts the plague's scope: the murrain falls "upon thy cattle which is in the field (אֲשֶׁר בַּשָּׂדֶה), upon the horses, the asses, the camels, the oxen, and the sheep." If the murrain struck only field animals, then sheltered or stabled animals survived, and "all the cattle of Egypt died" in 9:6 reads naturally as "all the [field] cattle died," leaving stock for the hail of 9:19. The harmonization is thus scaffolded on the text's own qualifier rather than invented to escape it, and to that degree it has real force.
Two features nonetheless keep the tension from dissolving cleanly. First, 9:6 itself drops the "in the field" qualifier and states the death absolutely ("all the cattle of Egypt died"), and 9:7 builds the plague's rhetorical climax on that absoluteness: Pharaoh sends to investigate and finds "there was not one of the cattle of the Israelites dead." The point of the verse is a total/total contrast — every Egyptian beast dead, every Israelite beast alive — and reading "all" as "all of a subset" blunts the very rhetoric the narrator is deploying. Second, critical analysis suggests the plague cycle is composite. William Propp's Anchor Bible commentary notes the inconsistency in the livestock count and treats the plagues as drawn from more than one stratum; Friedman's source division assigns the murrain and the hail to different strands, which explains why the surviving-cattle problem arises at the seams rather than within a single coherent account. On this view the discrepancy is not a subtle qualification the author intended but a residue of editorial combination.
The practical result is a partial harmonization. The hyperbolic reading, anchored in 9:3's explicit "in the field," makes the two verses logically co-possible, and an apologist is entitled to it. But it succeeds only by letting "all" in 9:6 mean "all of a restricted class" precisely where the narrative wants the word to land hard, and the composite character of the cycle gives a more economical account of why the cattle reappear.
Where the critical reading lands: harmonizable via the well-attested hyperbolic kol and the 'in the field' restriction, but the tension is real at the surface and is better explained as a seam between composite plague traditions; the question's 'sixth plague' label is mistaken — it is the fifth.
Sources for this reading
William H. C. Propp, Exodus 1-18 (AB 2; Doubleday, 1999) on Exodus 9:1-7Exodus 9:1-7
Richard Elliott Friedman, The Bible with Sources Revealed (HarperSanFrancisco, 2003) on the plague narrative
Terence E. Fretheim, Exodus (Interpretation; John Knox Press, 1991) on Exodus 9:1-7Exodus 9:1-7
Douglas K. Stuart, Exodus (NAC 2; Broadman & Holman, 2006) on Exodus 9:6Exodus 9:6
Gleason L. Archer, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties (Zondervan, 1982) on Exodus 9:6 and 9:19Exodus 9:6, Exodus 9:19
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
Note first a factual error in the question's framing: the death of the livestock is the fifth plague (the murrain, dever), not the sixth. The sixth plague is the boils (Exodus 9:8-12). With that corrected, the tension is genuine. Exodus 9:6 reports that after the murrain "all the cattle of Egypt died" (וַיָּמָת כֹּל מִקְנֵה מִצְרָיִם), yet at Exodus 9:19, in the run-up to the seventh plague (hail), YHWH warns the Egyptians to bring in "thy cattle, and all that thou hast in the field," since the hail will kill man and beast left outdoors. If all the cattle had already died, there would be none left to shelter from the hail.
The principal harmonization is the hyperbolic-kol defense, run by Archer, Stuart, and Kaiser and rooted in Keil-Delitzsch. Biblical Hebrew regularly uses כֹּל (kol, "all") in a rhetorical, non-exhaustive sense — comparable to "all Judea" going out to John (Mark 1:5) or "all the world" being taxed (Luke 2:1). Crucially, this is not an ad hoc appeal here, because Exodus 9:3 expressly restricts the plague's scope: the murrain falls "upon thy cattle which is in the field (אֲשֶׁר בַּשָּׂדֶה), upon the horses, the asses, the camels, the oxen, and the sheep." If the murrain struck only field animals, then sheltered or stabled animals survived, and "all the cattle of Egypt died" in 9:6 reads naturally as "all the [field] cattle died," leaving stock for the hail of 9:19. The harmonization is thus scaffolded on the text's own qualifier rather than invented to escape it, and to that degree it has real force.
Two features nonetheless keep the tension from dissolving cleanly. First, 9:6 itself drops the "in the field" qualifier and states the death absolutely ("all the cattle of Egypt died"), and 9:7 builds the plague's rhetorical climax on that absoluteness: Pharaoh sends to investigate and finds "there was not one of the cattle of the Israelites dead." The point of the verse is a total/total contrast — every Egyptian beast dead, every Israelite beast alive — and reading "all" as "all of a subset" blunts the very rhetoric the narrator is deploying. Second, critical analysis suggests the plague cycle is composite. William Propp's Anchor Bible commentary notes the inconsistency in the livestock count and treats the plagues as drawn from more than one stratum; Friedman's source division assigns the murrain and the hail to different strands, which explains why the surviving-cattle problem arises at the seams rather than within a single coherent account. On this view the discrepancy is not a subtle qualification the author intended but a residue of editorial combination.
The practical result is a partial harmonization. The hyperbolic reading, anchored in 9:3's explicit "in the field," makes the two verses logically co-possible, and an apologist is entitled to it. But it succeeds only by letting "all" in 9:6 mean "all of a restricted class" precisely where the narrative wants the word to land hard, and the composite character of the cycle gives a more economical account of why the cattle reappear.
Where the critical reading lands: harmonizable via the well-attested hyperbolic kol and the 'in the field' restriction, but the tension is real at the surface and is better explained as a seam between composite plague traditions; the question's 'sixth plague' label is mistaken — it is the fifth.
Sources for this reading