frog: the small marsh amphibian that breeds in river mud, named in the Bible only as the swarm God sent up out of the Nile over Egypt
This is the Bible's only word for a frog, and all thirteen of its appearances belong to a single story: the second plague on Egypt, told at length in Exodus and recalled twice in the Psalms. Hebrew never uses it for an ordinary animal in an ordinary setting. There is no proverb drawn from frogs, no comparison built on them, no rule about eating them. The word arrives with the plague already attached to it.
Most of the time it is plural, the mass of creatures that fills the river and then the land. Twice it is singular, and the singular is not one animal. It works the way English does when we say the deer are eating the garden: one word standing for a whole population. So when Exodus reports that "the frog came up and covered the land of Egypt," the picture is the same teeming multitude as everywhere else in the chapter.
What makes the account unbearable is not danger but reach. The frogs are never said to bite or to poison anyone. They simply get everywhere, and the text walks them step by step into the places a person most wants to keep clean:
- up out of the Nile and across the whole countryside
- into the palace, and into Pharaoh's own bedroom and bed
- into the houses of his officials and of his people
- into the ovens and the bowls where bread was kneaded
When they finally die in answer to Moses's prayer, they are raked into heaps and the country reeks of them.
Egypt had reason to feel the choice of creature. Frogs bred in the mud when the Nile flooded each year, so they belonged to the season of new life, and one Egyptian goddess of childbirth was pictured with a frog's head. Readers since ancient times have often taken the plague as a sign of Egyptian fertility turned against Egypt, though Exodus itself never draws that line. Where the Hebrew name came from is unknown: it does not look like an ordinary Hebrew formation and was very likely borrowed. Greek translators simply reached for their own everyday word for the animal (βάτραχος), the same word Revelation later picks up when three unclean spirits come out looking like frogs.