Exodus — Chapter 8

The Lord spoke to Moses: Go to Pharaoh and say to him: Thus saith the Lord: Let my people go to sacrifice to me. The plague of frogs comes when Pharaoh refuses. Lapide notes the Egyptians worshipped frogs (the goddess Heket). The abundance of what was sacred became a plague—again God uses the idol against the idolater. He draws the moral: excessive attachment to any earthly pleasure makes that pleasure bitter; God chastises the disordered appetite through the very thing it seeks.

The magicians said to Pharaoh: \"This is the finger of God.\" Even the pagan sorcerers were compelled to confess divine omnipotence at the plague of gnats, which they could not replicate. Lapide notes that \"finger of God\" (digitus Dei) in Scripture signifies the Holy Spirit, as Our Lord Himself interprets it (Lk. 11:20; cf. Mt. 12:28). The confession of God's finger by unbelievers is a greater glory to God than the praise of friends: vox veritatis extorta ab inimico.

But I will cause a separation in that day between the land of Goshen, where my people are, and the rest of Egypt. From the fourth plague onward, the plagues do not touch Goshen. Lapide explains this as a figure of the Church's protection from the judgments that afflict the world: not that the Church's members suffer no temporal hardships, but that they are spiritually protected from the spiritual catastrophes that overwhelm those outside the covenant. He cites Augustine (De Civ. Dei): the two cities are intermixed in history; only at the Last Judgment will the full separation be manifest.