And I will not again make you a reproach among
the heathen.
And the Northern Foe[1222] will I remove far
from you;
And I will push him into a land barren and waste,
His van to the eastern sea and his rear to the
western,[1223]
Till the stench of him rises,[1224]
Because he hath done greatly.
Locusts disappear with the same suddenness as they arrive. A wind springs up and they are gone.[1225] Dead Sea and Mediterranean are at the extremes of the compass, but there is no reason to suppose that the prophet has abandoned the realism which has hitherto distinguished his treatment of the locusts. The plague covered the whole land, on whose high watershed the winds suddenly veer and change. The dispersion of the locusts upon the deserts and the opposite seas was therefore possible at one and the same time. Jerome vouches for an instance in his own day. The other detail is also true to life. Jerome says that the beaches of the two seas were strewn with putrifying locusts, and Augustine[1226] quotes heathen writers in evidence of large masses of locusts, driven from Africa upon the sea, and then cast up on the shore, which gave rise to a pestilence. “The south and east winds,” says Volney of Syria, “drive the clouds of locusts with violence into the Mediterranean, and drown them in such quantities, that when their dead are cast on the shore they infect the air to a great distance.”[1227] The prophet continues, celebrating this destruction of the locusts as if it were already realised—the Lord hath done greatly, ver. 21. That among the blessings he mentions a full supply of rain proves that we were right in interpreting him to have spoken of drought as accompanying the locusts.[1228]