Anyone who’s enjoyed a nice summer night in the South is familiar with the sound of grasshoppers and crickets scratching their legs through their night. It’s actually quite a soothing sound; to me, it signifies that everything is at peace. Sing away, grasshoppers.
That might be why the eighth plague, the plague of locusts, never really stuck out to me as a child. After the previous two plagues consisted of boils and fiery hail, a swarm of locusts almost seems tame by comparison.
God positions the plague of locusts almost as a cleansing process. In Exodus 10:5, they’re going to “cover the surface” of Egypt—so much so that “no one will be able to see the land.” They’ll be on all the people and property of the Egyptian people, ostensibly leaving the Israelites untouched once again.
But the locusts won’t just sit around. According to Exodus 10:5, they’ll also eat everything that’s left from the plague of hail. Everything that wasn’t destroyed or burned down and every tree that still grows will now be completely annihilated.
It’s hard for our minds to fathom something like this, and yet, there have been several documented locust plagues throughout history. One happened in Africa in 2020, Syria in 1915, and on the Great Plains in 1874. All of them were called “Biblical” and all of them were devastating.
However, none of them matched the plague in Egypt. God specifically mentions in Exodus 10:6 that the plague will be so bad that neither your parents nor your grandparents will have a frame of reference for it. Like the other plagues, the Egyptians will be left bewildered by the scale and scope of the locusts.
In the Bible, locusts are seen elsewhere as a judgment sent straight from God, designed to get people’s attention. Joel 1 talks about a plague that ate all of Israel’s food supplies, then demands repentance from the reader in response to the evident power and justice of God.
In part, this is exactly what the plague of locusts is designed to do: get Pharaoh’s attention. After this plague, he’ll come a little closer to allowing the people to leave, but only after pressure from his own inner circle. As we’ll soon see, Pharaoh’s circle of supporters draw smaller day by day.
