Exodus 23:28
Read Exodus 23:28 Using Other Translations
What does Exodus 23:28 mean?
And I will send hornets before thee
Which may be interpreted either figuratively, and so may signify
the same as fear before which should fall on the Canaanites upon
hearing the Israelites were coming; the stings of their
consciences for their sins, terrors of mind, dreading the wrath
of the God of Israel, of whom they had heard, and terrible
apprehensions of ruin and destruction from the Israelites: Aben
Ezra interprets it of some disease of the body, which weakens it,
as the leprosy, from the signification of the word, which has
some affinity with that used for the leprosy; and so the Arabic
version understands it of a disease: or rather, the words are to
be taken literally, for hornets, which are a sort of wasps, whose
stings are very penetrating and venomous; nor is it any strange
or unheard of thing for people to be drove out of their countries
by small animals, as mice, flies, bees and particularly Aelianus
F17 relates, that the Phaselites were
drove out of their country by wasps: and Bochart
F18 has shown that those people were of a Phoenician original, and inhabited the mountains of Solymi; and that this happened to them about the times of Joshua, and so may probably be the very Canaanites here mentioned, as follow: the wasps, in Aristophanes's comedy which bears that name, are introduced speaking of themselves, and say, no creature when provoked is more angry and troublesome than we are F19:
which shall
drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite, and the Hittite,
from
before thee;
which three are mentioned instead of the rest, or because they
were more especially infested and distressed with the hornets,
and drove out of their land by means of them.
F17 Hist. Animal. l. 11. c. 28.
F18 Hierozoic. par. 2. l. 4. c. 13. col.
541.
F19 Aristoph. Vespae, p. 510.
