Skeptical Scholarship = "Cavalier Dismissal"

"Skeptical scholarship views the plagues as greatly exaggerated accounts of a perfectly understandable, albeit unusual, natural phenomena. But a serious appraisal of the narratives will not permit such cavalier dismissal of the catastrophic dimensions of the plagues. They must be understood for what they were--unique but genuinely historical outpourings of the wrath of a sovereign God who wished to show not only Egypt but his own people that he is the Lord of all of heaven and earth, one well able to redeem his people from the onerous slavery they knew under Pharaoh and to make them, by covenant, his own servant people (Eugene H. Merrill, Kingdom of Priests: A History of Old Testament Israel, p. 65)."