Parshat Bo5 min read

Why Egypt Was Stripped Until Nothing Green Remained

Fire rides inside hail, locusts eat what the hail left standing, the east wind sweeps away even the pickled locusts, and Egypt has nothing left to salvage.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. Fire Rode Inside the Hail and Egypt Had No Category for It
  2. Every Tree Shattered and Every Field Flattened
  3. Locusts Covered the Face of the Ground
  4. Even the Pickled Locusts Were Swept Away
  5. Enemy Walls Consumed Like Stubble in the Fire

Fire Rode Inside the Hail and Egypt Had No Category for It

When the seventh plague falls, the targum records something Egypt's scholars cannot explain. Fire darts inside the hailstones with exceeding force. Ice should extinguish fire. Fire should melt ice. Instead they sustain each other across the sky, each preserving the other long enough to strike the ground. Egypt has not witnessed anything like this since it became a nation.

The plague is not only more powerful than anything Egypt can produce. It is stranger than anything Egypt can explain. Egypt's learned men understand nature's categories: fire and water oppose each other, as do ice and heat. The God of Israel is demonstrating that creation obeys Him differently than it obeys the laws Egypt's priests have catalogued. The sky itself becomes a witness against their system of knowledge. What should be impossible is falling on their fields.

Every Tree Shattered and Every Field Flattened

The hail breaks every tree in Egypt. Every herb of the field is struck. Every person and animal left exposed in the open is killed. The targum is precise about what survives: wheat and spelt are not yet above the ground, so they are spared. That survival is not mercy for Egypt. It is preparation for the next plague. The wheat and spelt that escaped the hail are exactly what the locusts will eat.

Pharaoh calls Moses and Aaron. He confesses that God is righteous and he and his people are wicked. Moses goes outside the city and spreads his hands toward heaven. The thunder and hail and fire stop. But the targum notes that Pharaoh sees the rain has stopped and hardens his heart again. The confession lasted only as long as the noise. Egypt's repentance is exactly as durable as Egypt's comfort.

Locusts Covered the Face of the Ground

The east wind blows all night. In the morning the locusts come, covering the face of the whole ground until the land is dark. The targum says it is the worst locust swarm Egypt ever saw or ever would see. They eat every herb of the field that the hail has left standing. Every fruit of the trees. Everything green in the land of Egypt.

Nothing remains. The targum is not using approximation. It is recording a total. The sequence from hail to locusts is not accidental overlap. The hail left the wheat and spelt alive for a reason: so the locusts could find them. The plagues do not compete. They coordinate. Each one hands the next one something to work with.

Even the Pickled Locusts Were Swept Away

Pharaoh calls Moses and Aaron again. He confesses his sin against God and against them. He asks them to pray that God will remove this death from him. Moses goes out and prays, and a strong west wind comes and drives every locust into the Red Sea. Not one locust remains in all the border of Egypt.

But the targum preserves a detail that shows Egypt trying to salvage something. Egyptians had been preserving locusts as food, pickling them against a bad season. When the west wind comes, it takes even those. The pickled locusts, the preserved supply, the hedge against the swarm, all of it gone. Egypt could not even hold onto the disaster as a resource. The God who sent the locusts also sent the wind that removed every locust Egypt had tried to keep.

Enemy Walls Consumed Like Stubble in the Fire

At the sea, after Egypt's army pursues Israel, the targum reaches forward to the Song of Moses. The enemies who pursued Israel are described in a specific way: they will be consumed like stubble in fire. The image brings together the two plagues that stripped Egypt most completely, the hail that preceded the locusts and the locusts that ate what the hail left. Stubble is what remains after harvest. It burns fast. Pharaoh's army pursuing Israel into the sea is not a military force making a calculated choice. It is leftover material entering a fire that was already burning before the army arrived.

Egypt leaves the plagues emptied. No green, no stored grain, no preserved locusts, no firstborn, no army. The ten blows are not ten separate disasters. They are one sustained stripping, beginning with the Nile and ending with the sea, each stage removing something Egypt thought it still had until nothing remained that it could call its own.

Midrash AggadahTargumPlaguesDivine Justice
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From the tradition

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The texts this telling draws on, in full. Open a card to read inline, or expand it for a wider, quieter read.

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 9:24Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus

The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 9:24) reaches for superlatives: "There was hail, and fire darting among the hail with exceeding force: unto it had never been the like in all the land of Mizraim ever since it was a nation and a kingdom."

The Aramaic paraphrase, preserved in the tradition of Yonatan ben Uzziel, uses a striking phrase, min d'havat l'ama v'malchu, from the day Egypt became a nation and a kingdom. The Targumist is measuring the storm against the full span of Egyptian civilization. No dynasty, no pharaoh, no priestly chronicle recorded anything like this.

Inside the hail, the fire kept darting. Mishtaga, the Targum says, leaping. Shooting. A flame that could not be contained by the ice around it, and an ice that could not extinguish the flame within it.

Egypt's wise men, the same astrologers who had already been unable to stand before Moses because of the boils, had no framework for this. Their star-charts had no column for fire-inside-hail.

The Maggid teaches: the Holy One sometimes teaches not by sending what the wise can explain, but by sending what they cannot. When the categories of a society break, its gods break with them. Egypt's theology began to fracture in that storm. Pharaoh would need one more plague to feel the crack.

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Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 9:25Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus

The hail did not simply fall. It worked.

The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 9:25), the Aramaic paraphrase preserved in the tradition of Yonatan ben Uzziel, records the damage with the care of an accountant: "The hail smote in all the land of Mizraim whatsoever was in the field, of men and of cattle, and all the herbage of the field the hail smote, and every tree of the field it shattered and uprooted."

The Targum adds a detail the plain Hebrew does not emphasize, the trees were not just broken. They were uprooted. V'akar, the Aramaic says. Torn up from the ground. An economy that depended on orchards and grain fields was flattened in a single afternoon.

Every field. Every tree. Every exposed animal. The wealth of Egypt, accumulated across centuries, lay smashed across the soil.

And yet, the Torah tells us in the next chapter that Egypt still had crops left after the hail (the locusts would eat them). How? Because some grain ripens later in the season. The hail took the early harvest. The locust would take the late harvest. Together, the two plagues stripped Egypt across the full agricultural calendar.

The Maggid teaches: the Holy One's judgments are rarely random. They follow the season. They follow the crop. They follow the logic of the land they ruin.

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Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 10:5Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus

The warning for the eighth plague is as graphic as anything the Torah has yet described.

"They shall cover the face of the ground," the Lord tells Moses through the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 10:5), "so that it will be impossible to see the ground, and shall destroy the remainder that was spared to you from the hail, and destroy every tree which groweth for you out of the field."

The Aramaic paraphrase, preserved in the Targum attributed to Yonatan ben Uzziel, builds the image carefully. V'chasyu yat chezu ar'a, they shall cover the face of the earth. A living carpet of locusts so dense that soil itself disappears from view. And then the economic precision: what was spared from the hail.

Recall that the seventh plague had taken the early harvest, the barley and the flax. But wheat and spelt ripen later, and they had survived. Egypt's grain reserves were not destroyed. They were bruised but intact.

Now the Holy One announces that the locusts will finish what the hail started. What the ice spared, the teeth will consume.

The Maggid teaches: the Lord's judgments are measured. Each plague is tuned to strip away exactly what the previous one left. Egypt was not being punished randomly. It was being dismantled systematically, piece by piece, until nothing remained to hide behind.

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Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 10:14Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus

"The locust came up over all the land of Mizraim, and settled in all the limits of Mizraim exceedingly strong. Before him there had been no locust so hard, nor will there be like him" (Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 10:1)4).

The Aramaic paraphrase, preserved in the Targum attributed to Yonatan ben Uzziel, makes the claim sweeping. Kadamoi lo havu govin tkifin hei k'dein, v'batrei lo yehei k'vatei, no locusts so hard before him, and none will be like him after. A plague that stands alone in both past and future.

This is important. The Torah does not merely say the swarm was large. It says it was unrepeatable. The Holy One deliberately made this eighth plague a one-time event. Locust swarms come and go in the ancient Near East. Egypt's own chronicles record them. But this one, the Targum insists, will never have a twin.

The Maggid teaches: some of the Holy One's interventions in history are singular. They cannot be compared to what came before or what comes after. The ten plagues are not a general category of divine punishment. They are a specific, bounded, named sequence, designed for a specific people at a specific hour. Egypt's suffering was not a template. It was a one-time curriculum.

Which is also why, millennia later, the Haggadah still counts them out one by one at the Seder table, dam, tzefardea, kinim, because they are not a concept. They are a list. Each one happened once and will not happen again.

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Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 10:15Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus

"He covered the face of all the land, until the land was darkened, and every herb of the ground was consumed, and all the fruit of the tree that the hail had left; and nothing green of tree or herb of the field was left in all the land of Mizraim" (Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 10:1)5).

The Aramaic paraphrase, preserved in the Targum attributed to Yonatan ben Uzziel, uses the word chashochat ar'a, the land was darkened. This is a preview. The ninth plague, darkness, is only a few verses away. But already, in the eighth plague, the sky over Egypt has gone black with wings. Before the Lord sends true darkness, He sends a living darkness, made of insects.

The Targum is careful to note the full scope of the devastation. Lo ishte'ir yarok b'ilan u'v'issev chakla, nothing green was left on tree or herb in all the field. Not a leaf. Not a blade. The colors of the land had been revised.

The Maggid teaches: when the Holy One brings judgment, the land itself testifies. The soil remembers. The trees, stripped to skeletons. The fields, bare to the soil. Egypt's physical appearance changed. When visitors from other nations arrived in the coming weeks, they would see a country that looked as if it had been sacked by an army. But there was no army.

There was only the wind, and a prophet's hand, and a God no map could contain.

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Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 10:19Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus

The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 10:19) records one of the most curious details in the entire plague narrative.

"The Lord turned a wind from the west of exceeding strength, and it carried away the locust, and bare him to the sea of Suph: there was not one locust left in all the borders of Mizraim. And even such as had been salted in vessels for needed food, those, too, the western wind bare away, and they went."

The Aramaic paraphrase, preserved in the Targum attributed to Yonatan ben Uzziel, adds a detail the plain Hebrew text does not mention. The Egyptians, facing a plague of locusts, had done what ancient peoples often did with unwanted insect swarms, they had caught them, salted them, stored them in jars as a food reserve. Locusts are kosher to certain species and were a recognized famine food in the region. Egypt's pantries were full of them.

When the west wind came, the Targum says, it even carried away the salted ones in vessels. The locusts inside sealed jars were lifted out and blown to the Sea of Reeds. No trace remained.

The Maggid teaches: when the Holy One decides a plague is over, He does not leave a souvenir. Not one wing. Not one leg. Not one jar's worth. The judgment is finished, fully, and the evidence is removed so completely that Egypt cannot even eat the locusts that devoured their crops.

Total plague. Total removal. The signature of a precise God.

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Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 15:7Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan does not translate the Song of the Sea so much as it paints it. Where the Hebrew speaks of majesty, the Targum speaks of walls. Where the Hebrew says fire, the Targum shows us stubble.

The verse reads: And in the plenitude and greatness of Thy majesty Thou hast destroyed the walls of the enemies of Thy people. Thou wilt pour upon them Thy fierce anger, Thou wilt consume them as the burning fire prevails over the stubble.

Walls. That is the Targum's first surprise. Pharaoh's chariots were not simply men and horses, the paraphrast insists. They were walls, fortifications, the whole architecture of tyranny. When God struck them, He was not merely defeating soldiers. He was pulling down a civilization that had built itself on the backs of slaves.

Then the image shifts to fire and stubble. Stubble is what remains after the harvest: dry stalks, worthless for bread, ready to be burned before the next planting. The Targum is saying that Egypt's power, which had looked so solid, was in truth already spent. The plagues had harvested what was alive. What went into the sea was already stubble.

The Maggid pauses here. He wants you to hear the pacing. A fire prevails over stubble quickly, almost silently. There is no long battle. The tyranny that had held Israel for generations ended in the time it takes a flame to cross a dry field.

That is the Targum's quiet promise to every reader in every generation: what looks like a wall may already be stubble. The aggadic tradition returns to this image again and again.

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