Commentaria in Exodum
Mystically, St. Augustine opposes this fourth plague to the fourth precept, which is on honouring parents; for those who do not honour their parents are punished by the dog-fly, that is, by the wickedness of the devil: for it is canine not to acknowledge one’s parents. Whence the whelps of dogs are born blind.
Secondly, St. Augustine serm. 87, and Origen, by cynomyia understand the sect of the cynics, for their public and shameless use of lust.
Others understand heretics, who at the beginning fawn piously, but afterwards snarl and bite like dogs.
Most truly indeed did Blessed Thomas More say: “Our heretics have taken away hypocrisy, but substituted impudence, so that those who before feigned religion now glory in impiety.”
Thirdly, Pereira compares to dog-flies pettifoggers and other litigious men, who like dogs bite and tear one another.
Again, dog-flies are the slanderous; for, as Plutarch says in the Morals, as friends detest a dog running in and parting them, so men ought to execrate the canine, who by their slander part the goodwill of friends. Hence Alcibiades let loose through the city a huge dog with its tail cut off: when this seemed to many foolish and silly, and his friends warned him and told the talk that went about concerning him, Alcibiades, laughing, said: Thus the thing has turned out as I intended. For I wished to give the Athenians matter for talk, that by this new thing I might turn them from the worse things which they speak abusively of me and of others: Plutarch is witness in the Alcibiades.
Fourthly, St. Gregory, by every kind of flies, understands the restless and insolent cares of carnal desires, by which the followers of the world and of pleasures are agitated and stung. See him book 18 Moral. chap. 28.
22. AND I WILL MAKE THE LAND OF GESSEN WONDERFUL IN THAT DAY.—The Hebrew hiphleti may with the Chaldee be rendered, I will divide the land of Gessen, so that it alone in Egypt may be immune from this plague of flies. Whence thirdly, hiphleti can be rendered, I will deal miraculously with the land of Gessen. For the root pala signifies, he separated, or made wonderful, as if to say: I will make the land of Gessen pele, that is, wonderful, and a miracle of the world. So the Angel appearing to Manue the father of Samson, when asked by what name he was called? said, “Why askest thou my name, which is pele, that is, wonderful?” Judges 13:18. So Christ is called, Isaias 9:6, pele, that is, Wonderful. In like manner, aptly, at the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, when the Christians by God’s warning went out and escaped to the city of Pella, as Eusebius testifies, book 3, chap. 5, that city, either before or afterwards, namely from this wonderful escape, was called by the Christians Pela, or Pella, that is, wonderful separation: because as God once made the land of Gessen pele, that is wonderful, and separated it from the plagues of Egypt, so likewise He separated in Pella the Christians from the plagues of the Jews destroyed in Jerusalem by Titus. So Alcazar, Apoc. 7, near the beginning, p. 468.
AND THOU MAYEST KNOW THAT I AM THE LORD IN THE MIDST OF THE EARTH,—that is, lording it in the broad and ample earth. So the Hebrews call the middle, or heart, of the sea the sea itself, broad and deep; add, as a king sitting in the midst of his kingdom looks round about and administers the whole kingdom, so God by anthropopathy is said to sit in the midst of the earth as a king, and to rule most widely in every direction.
23. AND I WILL PUT A DIVISION.—The Hebrew is, I will put redemption, as if to say: I will redeem, exempt and deliver my Hebrews from the common plague which will afflict all Egypt.
24. AND THERE CAME A VERY GRIEVOUS SWARM OF FLIES.—This fourth plague of flies God inflicted without any sensible sign, without stretching of the rod, by Himself alone, lest anyone should suspect that there was any divinity in the rod, or that it was not God who did these things.
VERY GRIEVOUS SWARM.—“Very grievous,” that is, very many. For so by metalepsis, and by enallage of continuous quantity for discrete, the Hebrews take “Grievous” for many, copious. So Psalm 34:18 it is said: “In a grievous people,” that is, in a numerous one; and “…Egypt with a grievous multitude,” that is, a copious one. Nahum 3:3: “The voice of a grievous ruin,” that is, the voice of much slaughter; for there precedes “the voice of a multitude slain.” So also the Latins use “grievous,” as Varro in Nonius Marcellus, when he says: “Where grievous flocks of peacocks are pastured and fed”; grievous, that is, many; and Sallust: “There began throughout the whole province to be a grievous price for the fruits of the earth.”
Secondly, “very grievous,” that is, most troublesome and most hurtful, to men as well as to beasts. Whence follows: “And the land was corrupted by this kind of flies.” Hence Abulensis thinks these flies were venomous by their bite. So Pliny relates, book 10, chap. 28, that flies once destroyed whole nations and regions, and therefore, he says, the Eleans worshipped the god Myiodes, or Myiagrus, as the fly-Jove, to drive off the pestilence of flies; as the Accaronites worshipped Beelzebub, that is, the god Fly, whom many think the same as Myiodes or Myiagrus, that is, the fly-Jove.
26. FOR WE SHALL SACRIFICE THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EGYPTIANS TO THE LORD OUR GOD.—Our Interpreter renders it interrogatively for emphasis, as the Chaldee and Pagninus render it, as if to say: In no way is it expedient that in Egypt before the Egyptians we should slay and sacrifice sheep and oxen; for these they themselves worship. Whence, if we kill them, they will stone us; as is plain from what follows.
Thou wilt ask, what are the abominations of the Egyptians?
Note that abomination is put for an abominable thing, or abominated. See Can. 21. Now, first, some take it so that “abominations” are called those things which the Egyptians sacrificed to their gods, which were to be abominated by the Hebrews; for among the ancients a swine was sacrificed to Ceres, a goose to Venus, an ass to Priapus, a dog to Diana, a horse to Phoebus. But to sacrifice these animals was unlawful to the Hebrews.
Secondly and genuinely, as is plain from the Hebrew and from what follows, “abominations” are here called the sacred cattle, whose slaughter, as sacrilegious, the Egyptians abominated, as those who worshipped them as divinities, or as having something of divinity. Whence what are here called “abominations” are shortly after called “those things which the Egyptians worship.” For so they worshipped Jupiter Ammon in the ram, Apis in the calf and ox. So Philo. For this cause also the Egyptians detested shepherds of sheep, namely because they are wont to slay the sheep which the Egyptians worshipped, as was said Gen. 46. For although the law of Leviticus on victims had not yet been given, Moses knew, partly from the tradition and example of his forefathers, partly from God’s prompting, that God wished sheep and oxen to be sacrificed to Him, not swine and other unclean animals. Note this against Rupert, who tries here to exclude the literal sense and substitute the tropological.
Tropologically, the abominations of the Egyptians are faith, justice, piety, penance, mortification of the flesh and of desires, and other virtues, whose sacrifice is most pleasing to God, which the impious abhor and shun.
Hear St. Gregory, book 10 Moral. chap. 23: “What does this sinner hope in all his thoughts, but to surpass the rest in power, to outstrip all in abundance of goods, to subdue opponents by ruling, to be known with wonder by the obsequious, to satisfy anger at will; to show himself kind when praised; to offer whatever gluttony desires. Rightly therefore is their hope called an abomination: because the things which the carnal court, the spiritual, by a judgment of rectitude, shun; and what they esteem pleasure, these deem pain; because as the flesh is nourished by soft things, so the soul by hard, and as hard things wound the flesh, so soft things slay the spirit. The hope therefore of carnal men is called an abomination to the soul, because thence the spirit perishes for ever, whence for a time the flesh lives sweetly”; and chap. 26: “What the Egyptians abominate, this the Israelites offer to God: because the simplicity of conscience, which all the unjust despise, this the just turn into a sacrifice of virtue, and, cultivating the purity and meekness of rectitude, immolate to God what the reprobate, abominating, deem folly.”
32. AND WAS MADE HEAVY.—In Hebrew, and Pharao made heavy his own heart. So also the Septuagint.