Exodus 10:19

And the Lord turned a mighty strong west wind,.... He turned the wind the contrary way it before blew; it was an east wind that brought the locusts, but now it was changed into a west wind, or "a

And the locusts went up over all the land of Egypt, and rested in all the coasts of Egypt: very grievous were they; before them there were no such locusts as they, neither after them shall be such.

A mighty strong west wind; Heb. a wind of the sea, i.e. coming from the sea, called there the great sea, and the Mediterranean Sea, from whence came the north-west wind, which did blow the locusts directly into the Red Sea. Cast them, as the Hebrew word signifies, with a great noise, and with great force, so as they should never rise again to molest them. The Red Sea; Heb. the sea of bulrushes, so called from the great number of bulrushes near its shore; or, the sea of bounds or limits, q.d. the narrow sea, whereas they could see no bounds nor shore beyond the Mediterranean Sea. It was called the Arabian Gulf, and by others the Red Sea, either from its red sand, or rather from Esau, called also Edom, which signifies red, , from whom as the adjoining country was called Edom, or red, so this was called the Red Sea.

Exodus 10:19 And the LORD turned a mighty strong west wind, which took away the locusts, and cast them into the Red sea; there remained not one locust in all the coasts of Egypt.Ver. 19. A mighty strong west wind.] Rupertus calls the winds mundi scopas, the besoms wherewith God sweeps his great house of this world. Like as his spiritual house - the hearts of his people - he sweeps off all foul lusts, those hellish locusts, with that rushing mighty wind spoken of in Acts 2:2.

(19) The Lord turned a mighty strong west wind . . . —As locusts come, so they commonly go, with a wind. They cannot fly far without one. It often happens that a wind blows them into the sea. Pallas says, speaking of Crimean locusts in the year 1799:—“Great numbers of them were carried [from the Crimea] by northerly winds into the sea, where they perished, and were afterwards washed on shore in heaps” (Travels, vol. ii., p. 424). The Red sea.—Heb., the sea of weeds, or of rushes. The Red Sea probably acquired this name among the Hebrews from the fact that in the time of Moses its north-western recess communicated with a marshy tract, extending as far as the Bitter Lakes, and abounding in aquatic plants of a luxuriant growth. (Comp. Exodus 2:3, where the same term designates the water-plants of the Nile.) There remained not one locust . . . —Niebuhr says of locusts in Arabia:—“Souvent il en reste beaucoup après le départ général” (Description de l’ Arabie, p. 153). But, on the other hand, there are times when the whole swarm takes its departure at once. “A wind from the south-west,” says Morier, “which had brought them, so completely drove them forwards that not a vestige of them was to be seen two hours afterwards” (Second Journey, p. 98).

Verse 19. A mighty strong west wind] רוח ים ruach yam, literally the wind of the sea; the wind that blew from the Mediterranean Sea, which lay north-west of Egypt, which had the Red Sea on the east. Here again God works by natural means; he brought the locusts by the east wind, and took them away by the west or north-west wind, which carried them to the Red Sea where they were drowned. The Red Sea] ים סוף yam suph, the weedy sea; so called, as some suppose, from the great quantity of alga or sea-weed which grows in it and about its shores. But Mr. Bruce, who has sailed the whole extent of it, declares that he never saw in it a weed of any kind; and supposes it has its name suph from the vast quantity of coral which grows in it, as trees and plants do on land. "One of these," he observes, "from a root nearly central, threw out ramifications in a nearly circular form measuring twenty-six feet diameter every way." - Travels, vol. ii., p. 138. In the Septuagint it is called θαλασσαερυθρα, the Red Sea, from which version we have borrowed the name; and Mr. Bruce supposes that it had this name from Edom or Esau, whose territories extended to its coasts; for it is well known that the word אדם Edom in Hebrew signifies red or ruddy. The Red Sea, called also the Arabic Gulf, separates Arabia from Upper AEthiopia and part of Egypt. It is computed to be three hundred and fifty leagues in length from Suez to the Straits of Babelmandel, and is about forty leagues in breadth. It is not very tempestuous, and the winds usually blow from north to south, and from south to north, six months in the year; and, like the monsoons of India, invariably determine the seasons of sailing into or out of this sea. It is divided into two gulfs: that to the east called the Elanitic Gulf, from the city of Elana to the north end of it; and that to the west called the Heroopolitan Gulf, from the city of Heroopolis; the former of which belongs to Arabia, the latter to Egypt. The Heroopolitan Gulf is called by the Arabians Bahr el Kolzum, the sea of destruction, or of Clysmae, an ancient town in that quarter; and the Elanitic Gulf Bahr el Akaba, the sea of Akaba, a town situated on its most inland point.

19. turned, &c.] i.e. caused by a change a west wind to blow. west wind] Heb. a sea-wind. The ‘west’ is regularly in Heb. the sea (Genesis 12:8; Genesis 13:14, &c.). The idiom must have formed itself in Palestine, where the ‘sea’ was on the west. It is a common fate of locust swarms to be driven away by the wind, and to perish in the sea. Cf. Joe 2:20, with the writer’s note (p. 60). Pliny (H.N. xi. 35) writes, ‘Gregatim sublatae vento in maria aut stagna decidunt.’ The swarm described by Denon (on v. 4) was driven back by a change of wind into the desert on the East.

West wind - Literally, “a sea wind,” a wind blowing from the sea on the northwest of Egypt. Red sea - The Hebrew has the “Sea of Suph”: the exact meaning of which is disputed.

19. A mighty strong west wind — Literally, wind of the sea, that is, the Mediterranean, which is west from Palestine, but northwest from the Egyptian Delta, which is the scene of this history.