THE GLORIOUS CONSUMMATION 529
The withholding of rain was one of the ways by which God was wont to punish the apostasy of His own people in the days of the theocracy, 1 and He now threatens to inflict it on the Gentile nations in case of disobedience. At the same time, there is also here a blending of the literal and the piritual, and the punishment threatened includes also the withholding from the disobedient nations, or " families," of the showers of God s grace and blessing, of which the literal rain is often used in Scripture as an emblem.
For this punishment, in case of disobedience, there will be no exception and escape. This is the thought ex pressed in the two following verses : " And if the family of Egypt go not up, and come not, then also not upon them ; tJtere sJiall be the plague wherewith Jehovah will plague the nations that go not up to keep the Feast of Tabernacles"
This is the literal rendering of the words as they stand in the Hebrew text, but the actual meaning is not ab solutely certain. 2
Egypt is especially named according to Von Orelli, Koehler, and others, because of its peculiar conditions and climate for however it ultimately depended on the equa torial rains, which overfilled the lakes which supply the Nile, it did not need that fine arrangement of the rains ot autumn and spring which were essential to the fruitfulness of Palestine. Hence it may perhaps encourage itself in the thought that the threatened infliction in case of disobedience would be no punishment to them. The prophet therefore
1 Comp. I Kings xvii., xviii.
2 Most commentators supply the words Dffan nvr, yihyeh haggashem, " and not upon (or neither upon them ) shall be the rain." It is possible, however, that the adverb, vh (" not") before the word DivVy, "upon them," has crept in by mistake from the previous line, and that the Septuagint is in this case likely to be correct. By omitting one of the negatives, it reads simply, " And if the tribe of Egypt does not go up nor come, the plague will be upon them with which Jehovah will smite all the nations." Lange, following Hitzigand Bunsen, renders the passage interrogatively : " And if the family of Egypt will not go up and will not come, then will the plague not fall upon them with which Jehovah shall smite the nation which will not go up in order to keep the Feast of Tabernacles?" to which question the igth verse is, according to this rendering, supposed to be the answer. But this translation is rejected by most scholars on grammatical grounds.
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