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[300]
Accordingly, God punished his falseness with another plague, added
to the former; for there arose out of the bodies of the Egyptians an innumerable
quantity of lice, by which, wicked as they were, they miserably perished,
as not able to destroy this sort of vermin either with washes or with ointments.
At which terrible judgment the king of Egypt was in disorder, upon the
fear into which he reasoned himself, lest his people should be destroyed,
and that the manner of this death was also reproachful, so that he was
forced in part to recover himself from his wicked temper to a sounder mind,
for he gave leave for the Hebrews themselves to depart. But when the plague
thereupon ceased, he thought it proper to require that they should leave
their children and wives behind them, as pledges of their return; whereby
he provoked God to be more vehemently angry at him, as if he thought to
impose on his providence, and as if it were only Moses, and not God, who
punished the Egyptians for the sake of the Hebrews: for he filled that
country full of various sorts of pestilential creatures, with their
various properties, such indeed as had never come into the sight of men
before, by whose means the men perished themselves, and the land was destitute
of husbandmen for its cultivation; but if any thing escaped destruction
from them, it was killed by a distemper which the men underwent also.
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