Exhortation

For the Egyptians, frogs are symbols of fertility.  Heqet, the Egyptian goddess of childbirth, has a frog’s head.  When frogs start breeding in the Nile, it’s a sign that the divine Nile’s generosity.  But there can be too much of a good thing.  Fecundity is good only if what’s multiplying is something you want.

In the plague of frogs, the Egyptians are reminded of an earlier plague of fertility that overran the land.  Frogs swarm over the land (8:6), just like Hebrews once did (1:7; only two uses of sharatz in Exodus).  Exodus 1 describes the teeming fertility of the Hebrews by piling up seven words; here, frogs swarm into seven places – into houses, bedrooms, beds, houses of servants; they climb on people, into ovens, into kneading bowls.  When frogs come up out of the Nile and fill the land, they are like the Hebrew boys rising from their watery graves to wreak vengeance on Egypt.

The frogs are doing what they are created to do, multiplying abundantly.  But their fertility is deadly.  Egypt’s places of fertility and food – beds and ovens – are stuffed with frogs, and then the land is piled with putrid rotting frogs.  The frogs’ sevenfold fertility overwhelms Egypt.

We typically think of God’s judgments negatively, as removal of good things.  We don’t think that He might judge us by giving us a surfeit of things we desire, by stuffing us full of quail until it comes out our nose.  But He judges Egypt with an excess of blessing, and does the same with grumbling Israelites.  This is not judgment by de-creation so much as judgment by super-creation.

“Look at all the frogs,” we might say.  “It’s a good omen.  We must be doing something right.”  Then they keep coming and coming, and soon they’re filling our kneading bowls.  Beware: Abundance can be a snare, and even a judgment.