If you do not let my people go, I will send swarms of flies on you and your officials, on your people and into your houses. The houses of Egypt will be full of flies, and even the ground will be covered with them. The fourth plague escalates from gnats to flies — dense, swarming clouds of insects that will fill houses and cover the ground. The Egyptian god Khepri, depicted with a scarab-beetle head, was associated with the rising sun and the movement of heavenly bodies; the swarming insects represent a different kind of movement, not the ordered rotation of celestial bodies but the chaotic multiplication of creatures under divine command. Ecclesiastes 10:1 observes that dead flies make a perfumer's ointment stink — a little corruption spoils a great deal of good. Egypt's entire existence is being made to stink by the God it has refused to acknowledge.

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