Shabbat Parashat Bo - 5784

Shabbat Parashat Bo - 5784

Rabbi Hal Miller

  It will cover the eye of the land so that he will not be able to see the land, and it will

  consume the remaining residue that was left to you by the hail, and it will consume

  all the trees that grow for you from the field. [Shemot 10:5]

What is "the eye of the land", and who is "he" who will not be able to see the land? The

Hebrew reads: v'kisa et ayin ha'aretz v'lo yu'chal l'rot et ha'aretz. We see nearly the

same words ten verses down, Shemot 10:15: va'yikas et ayin kol ha'aretz.

Taking our second question first, the context is Moshe telling Pharaoh that God is about

to take action that will prevent anyone, meaning the Egyptians, from seeing the land.

Onkelos words it, "no one will be able to see the land". Thus the "he" is the generic term

for any person and does not actually appear in the verse. It literally says, "and will not be

able to see", without specifying who. Our question then is derived from the translation

into English and does not exist in Hebrew.

But our first question is not so simple. The key word is ayin, which is normally translated

as 'eye'. Other options are face, appearance, and various similar words. We could easily

answer our question if we translate it as face, or even better surface, and the verse then

makes sense. Shemot Rabbah [13:4] in fact does just this. But most other commentators

do not agree, and other words are more commonly used than ayin for face or surface.

Rashi calls it the "view of the land", derived from eye or appearance. Onkelos is more

specific, that it means "the vision of the sun over the earth", that in order to see the land

there must be a source of light, which is now blocked by the locusts. This indicates that

the 'view' is what the sun can see, rather than what a human can see.

Rav Hirsch takes the opposite view from Onkelos, that "the eye is called an ayin, a spring

or source, not because the soul of man flows out of it, but because it is through the eye that

the world flows into man." This means that the visibility is from the point of view of man.

There is a difference between our verse, which refers to "the land" and "the field", and

verses 10:12-15 which specify Egypt and adding the word 'all' for that land. This can help

us understand our verse. The word ha'aretz can mean "the land" or "the earth" as a whole.

In these later verses, the Torah specifies "all the land of Egypt", which indicates that our verse

must mean something different. Malbim says that in [14] the locusts ascended into the air,

then descended throughout Egypt and ate all "that the hail left over". But we know that the

land of Goshen was not destroyed by the hail earlier even though [9:25] says that "all the land

of Egypt" was struck,

Taking all of this into account, perhaps we might understand that the locust cloud went up from

all the earth and gathered to block out the sun only from Egypt such that the Egyptians could

not see, then devoured all the Egyptian vegetation, which did not include that of the Jews in

Goshen. In this, none of the rest of the earth had visibility problems.