על חיי משה, ספר א י״חOn the Life of Moses, Book I 18
א׳
1[102] For a very short time they relaxed, but soon betook themselves to the same cruelty and lawlessness as before, and seemed to think that either justice had disappeared utterly from amongst men, or that those who had suffered one punishment could not be expected to receive a second blow. But, like foolish children, they were taught once more by experience not to despise the warning. For chastisement, dogging their steps, slowed down when they tarried, but when they hastened to deeds of wickedness quickened its pace and overtook them.
ב׳
2[103] For once more the brother of Moses, at God’s command, stretched forth and brought his rod upon the canals and lakes and fens; and, as he stretched it, a multitude of frogs crept up, so numerous that not only the market-places and all the open spaces, but all the farm-buildings as well, and houses and temples and every place, public or private, was filled with them, as though it were nature’s purpose to send one kind of the aquatic animals to colonize the opposite region, since land is the opposite of water.
ג׳
3[104] The people, who could neither go out into the streets, because the passages were occupied by the frogs, nor yet stay indoors, because they had already crept up even to the tops of the houses and taken up the inmost recesses, were in the most unhappy and desperate straits.
ד׳
4[105] So, after the king had promised them to permit the Hebrews to leave the land, they fled for refuge to those who had helped them before; and they made intercession with God, and when their prayer was granted some of the frogs went back into the river, and others died at once and lay in heaps at the cross-roads, to which the Egyptians added the piles of those which they brought out of their houses, because of the intolerable stench arising from the dead bodies, and bodies of a kind which, even when alive, is highly displeasing to the senses.