Jehovah be with you when I let you and your little ones go;” i.e., may Jehovah help you in the same way in which I let you and your little ones go. This indicated contempt not only for Moses and Aaron, but also for Jehovah, who had nevertheless proved Himself, by His manifestations of mighty power, to be a God who would not suffer Himself to be trifled with. After this utterance of his ill-will, Pharaoh told the messengers of God that he could see through their intention. “Evil is before your face;” i.e., you have evil in view. He called their purpose an evil one, because they wanted to withdraw the people from his service. “Not so,” i.e., let it not be as you desire. “Go then, you men, and serve Jehovah.” But even this concession was not seriously meant. This is evident from the expression, “Go then,” in which the irony is unmistakeable; and still more so from the fact, that with these words he broke off all negotiation with Moses and Aaron, and drove them from his presence. ויגרשׁ: “one drove them forth;” the subject is not expressed, because it is clear enough that the royal servants who were present were the persons who drove them away. “For this are ye seeking:” אתהּ relates simply to the words “serve Jehovah,” by which the king understood the sacrificial festival, for which in his opinion only the men could be wanted; not that “he supposed the people for whom Moses had asked permission to go, to mean only the men” (Knobel). The restriction of the permission to depart to the men alone was pure caprice; for even the Egyptians, according to Herodotus (2, 60), held religious festivals at which the women were in the habit of accompanying the men. After His messengers had been thus scornfully treated, Jehovah directed Moses to bring the threatened plague upon the land. “Stretch out thy hand over the land of Egypt with locusts;” i.e., so that the locusts may come. עלה, to go up: the word used for a hostile invasion. The locusts are represented as an army, as in Joe 1:6. Locusts were not an unknown scourge in Egypt; and in the case before us they were brought, as usual, by the wind. The marvellous character of the phenomenon was, that when Moses stretched out his hand over Egypt with the staff, Jehovah caused an east wind to blow over the land, which blew a day and a night, and the next morning brought the locusts (“brought:” inasmuch as the swarms of locusts are really brought by the wind).
