Personal Website of Yakov Shafranovich

« Yahoo Begins to Use DomainKeys Development Tools for FireFox and Opera »

Locust Back in Egypt After 4000 Years?

Posted November 17, 2004 – 8:22 pm by Yakov Shafranovich in Website

This comes from a Reuters story at Yahoo which makes interesting comparisons between the current plague of locusts in Egypt and the biblical one (via Drudge):

Swarms of pink locusts swept through the Egyptian capital on Wednesday, evoking the biblical description of the plagues which struck in the time of Moses. The swarms of millions flew high above tall towers or swooped down onto treelined streets, where scared pedestrians stamped on them or ran for cover.
…
“This is really horrible,” said one man as he ran past a building where locusts, some of them more than 3 inches (7.6 cm) long, smacked into office windows or landed on cars. Some of the locusts, which arrived and disappeared in waves, settled on shrubs and trees. Authorities battled swarms at Cairo international airport, but flights were unaffected.
…
The locust swarms have already traveled on the wind from North Africa to Cyprus. They can form swarms of tens of millions, occupying hundreds of square kilometers (miles). In the Old Testament, locusts were the eighth of 10 plagues which God brought on the Egyptians before Pharaoh, their ruler, relented and let the enslaved children of Israel go.

Of course a picture is worth a thousand words: