gnats: the tiny biting insects of Egypt's third plague, a pest that comes out of the dust and settles on people and animals in numbers nobody can count
Almost every use of this word belongs to one scene. Egypt has refused to let Israel go, and God tells Moses to have Aaron strike the dust of the ground so that the dust of the whole country turns into these insects. They get onto people and onto livestock. Egypt's own experts try to produce the same pest by their arts and cannot, and that is the moment they tell Pharaoh they are up against the finger of God. A psalm retelling the exodus names the creatures again in a single line, and Isaiah reaches for them once as a comparison.
Which insect this was has never been settled, because the account is interested in what the creatures did rather than in what they were. Everything it gives us is behavior:
- they come out of the dust of the ground, not out of the river or the air
- they get onto human beings and farm animals alike
- Egypt's specialists try to produce the same pest and fail
- nothing is said about ruined crops, only about bodies
The early Greek translation of Exodus took them as small stinging flies, gnats or mosquitoes, and that is where most modern versions land. Josephus and the later Jewish tradition read them as lice instead, which is why older English Bibles say "lice."
The plague that follows this one is a swarm whose creature the text never identifies at all (עָרֹב), and Psalm 105:31 sets the two side by side as consecutive blows. Hebrew also has an ordinary word for a fly (זְבוּב), and Exodus did not use it here. Whatever these creatures were, they were small enough and numerous enough that Isaiah could later picture the inhabitants of the earth dying like them, a death so slight that nobody stops to count it.
Nuances
Disputed
Which insect the third plague consisted of. The narrative describes what the creatures did without saying what they were, the noun occurs almost nowhere else, and the ancient translations already disagree, so every identification rests on the versions, on the behavior the text reports, and on the natural history of the Nile valley.
- majoritySmall flying, biting insects: gnats or mosquitoes. The Greek Old Testament uses terms for small stinging flies in both Exodus and the Psalter, Jerome's Latin borrows the Greek word, and the standard lexica gloss the noun as gnats or mosquitoes; the link the narrative draws between water, dust, and pest suits insects breeding as the Nile inundation recedes.; HALOT, s.v. כֵּן; BDB, s.v. כֵּן; DCH, s.v. כן; Greta Hort, "The Plagues of Egypt," Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 69 (1957): 84-103 and 70 (1958): 48-59
- minorityLice or a similar crawling parasite of people and animals. Josephus reports the third plague this way, the classical Jewish exegetical tradition followed suit, and the reading suits a pest said to be on human beings and livestock rather than in the air; it is the basis of the older English rendering "lice," which the Jewish Publication Society translation retains.; Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, Book 2 (the plague narrative); Nahum M. Sarna, Exodus, JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991)
- contestedThe species is beyond recovery. The account supplies behavior rather than description, the noun has no secure cognate to settle it, and the ancient renderings are themselves early interpretations rather than independent evidence of the creature.; William H. C. Propp, Exodus 1-18, Anchor Bible 2 (New York: Doubleday, 1999); Cornelis Houtman, Exodus, Historical Commentary on the Old Testament (Kampen: Kok, 1993-2002)