A Journey Through the Bible: Exodus 9 and 10

Exodus 9:18—“Behold, tomorrow about this time I will cause very heavy hail to rain down, such as has not been in Egypt since its founding until now.” A couple of interesting thoughts come to mind about this whole section. Notice that the Lord (through Moses) told Pharaoh that the plague would come “tomorrow.” If Pharaoh had had sense enough to repent of his hardness of heart and allow the children of Israel to leave, then no doubt the Lord would have recanted on His plan. Pharaoh was given a chance to save his people, but he refused. Nearly always in the Scriptures, the Lord gives man space to repent; for example, Noah (apparently) preached 120 years before God sent the flood (Genesis 6:3). The Canaanites were given 400 years to repent before God sent the children of Israel into the Promised Land and obliterated them (Gen. 15:16). Pharaoh had his chance, and didn’t take it. We have a chance, too, and if we refuse God’s call, it won’t be His fault.

Exodus 10:14-15—“And the locusts went up over all the land of Egypt and rested on all the territory of Egypt. They were very severe; previously there had been no such locusts as they, nor shall there be such after them. For they covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened; and they ate every herb of the land and all the fruit of the trees which the hail had left. So there remained nothing green on the trees or on the plants of the field throughout all the land of Egypt.” One traveler describes for us the swarms of locusts: “Clouds of locusts frequently alight on the plains of the Noguais, (the Tartars), and giving preference to their fields of millet, ravage them in an instant. Their approach darkens the horizon, and so enormous is their multitude, it hides the light of the sun. They alight on the fields, and there form a bed of six or seven inches thick. To the noise of their flight succeeds that of their devouring actively, which resembles the rattling of hail-stones; but its consequences are infinitely more destructive. Fire itself eats not so fast; nor is there any appearance of vegetation to be found when they again take their flight, and go elsewhere to produce new disasters.” The Tartars lived in the Russian steppes, but the impact is the same. Famine nearly always followed a locust swarm, and perhaps the only reason such did not happen in the Exodus plague is that the land of Goshen, a very rich, fertile area in the Nile delta region, was spared the devastation. That’s only speculation on my part, however. It’s distinctly possible that famine did hit Egypt, after the Israelites left.