68 Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society Vol. XII 



maker of the great plague. His expression is merely unliteral 

 allegory of obstacles piled up to prevent the exodus of the He- 

 brews, and to identify a species in connection with it is at best 

 arrant nonsense. 



In the same chapter of Exodus, verses 21, 22, 24, and 29, is 

 described another plague, in the King James version thus : 



" I will send swarms of flies upon thee, and upon thy servants, 

 and upon thy people, and into thy houses; and the houses of the 

 Egyptians shall be full of swarms of flies, and also the ground 

 whereon they are. 



"And I will sever the land of Goshen, in which my people 

 dwell, that no swarms of flies shall be there. 



" And there came a grievious swarm of flies into the house of 

 Pharaoh and into his servants' houses, and into all the land of 

 Egypt; and the land was corrupted ('destroyed,' margin) by 

 reason of the swarm of flies. 



This plague was not unlike its predecessor, described in general 

 terms, not giving or intending to give any clear idea of its nature. 

 The word used is arob^ about the et3'mology or meaning of which 

 there is no doubt. It means swarm, multitude, abundance. In 

 the King James translation the word sebub is understood, making 

 it mean swarm of flies. The trouble with this interpretation is 

 that swarms of flies are a constant plague in Egypt, causing more 

 ophthalmia than in any other land in the world. Musca domes- 

 tica is more plentiful than all other insects combined. It is hard 

 to imagine how in any number they could constitute a great 

 plague to figure in the greatest narrative ever written. The com- 

 mentators in all centuries have very generally taken some such 

 view and made every effort to demonstrate that the swarm wa^* 

 something much more terrible than ordinary flies. The Ro- 

 man fathers generally construed it as a mixture of various 

 kinds of flies. Some of the Jews before the Christian era inter- 

 preted it as various animals. Flavius Josephus got his infor- 

 mation about the matter from the Babylonian Targum. A seven- 

 teenth century translation of Josephus renders it "a mixture of 

 noisesome beasts," which phrase appears in the margin of the 

 King James version. An Arabic version comes out more strongly, 

 " a mixture of wild beasts, venemous insects and reptiles." An 



