[12] But indeed this notion is not yet dead. “A high wind left the shallow sea so low that it became possible to ford it. Moses eagerly accepted the suggestion, and made the venture with success,” etc.—Wellhausen, “Israel,” in Encyc. Brit.
[13] x. 22. The accurate Kalisch is therefore wrong in speaking of “The duration of the first plague, a statement not made with regard to any of the subsequent inflictions.”—Commentary in loco.
[14] Speaker’s Commentary, i., p. 242; Kalisch on viii. 18; Kiel, i. 484.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE SECOND PLAGUE.
viii. 1–15.
Although Pharaoh had warning of the first plague, no appeal was made to him to avert it by submission. But before the plague of frogs he was distinctly commanded, “Let My people go.” It is an advancing lesson. He has felt the power of Jehovah: now he is to connect, even more closely, his suffering with his disobedience; and when this is accomplished, the third plague will break upon him unannounced—a loud challenge to his conscience to become itself his judge.
The plague of frogs was far greater than our experience helps us to imagine. At least two cases are on record of a people being driven to abandon their settlements because they had become intolerable; “as even the vessels were full of them, the water infested and the food uneatable, as they could scarcely set their feet on the ground without treading on heaps of them, and as they were vexed by the smell of the great multitude that died, they fled from that region.”