Locusts A Bad Omen? Passages From The Bible & The Quran Go Viral After Pests Descend On Crops
People can't help but relate it to a biblical passage the portends the end of the world with a pandemic and a locust attack. Locusts belong to the family of grasshoppers and are usually harmless but certain environmental conditions like monsoon and heavy cyclones make them reproduce faster. The swarm is highly mobile and covers 50 to more than 100 km in a day.
A cloud of menacing insects eating away entire fields of crops has wreaked havoc in India and neighbouring Pakistan recently. Reports say that it's the worst locust attack we've seen in almost three decades.
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People can't help but relate it to a biblical passage that portends the end of the world with a pandemic and a locust attack. A seemingly vengeful god of The Old Testament sends a swarm of locusts to teach the Egyptians a lesson for ill-treating Jews, saying:
¡°Let my people go, so that they may worship me. If you refuse to let them go, I will bring locusts into your country tomorrow. They will cover the face of the ground so that it cannot be seen. They will devour what little you have left after the hail, including every tree that is growing in your fields.¡±
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Many have also pointed out the Bible verses from the Book of Exodus in the Old Testament :
Exodus Chapter 10 verses 12 to 15 states, ¡°(12) And the Lord said to Moses, ¡°Stretch out your hand over Egypt so that locusts swarm over the land and devour everything growing in the fields, everything left by the hail. (13) So Moses stretched out his staff over Egypt, and the Lord made an east wind blow across the land all that day and all that night. By morning the wind had brought the locusts; (14) they invaded all Egypt and settled down in every area of the country in great numbers. Never before had there been such a plague of locusts, nor will there ever be again. (15) They covered all the ground until it was black. They devoured all that was left after the hail¡ªeverything growing in the fields and the fruit on the trees. Nothing green remained on tree or plant in all the land of Egypt.¡±
It was already shared in the Bible about the Pandemic,locusts and rain. PRAY and TRUST him everything will be fine and most importantly turn away from your sins so that the world gets mercy.?? #pandemic #Cyclone #Locustsattack #BibleVerses #faith #trust #pray pic.twitter.com/gMtyMSPrB7
¡ª Sonal Joseph (@joseph_sonal) May 28, 2020
From biblical times locusts have posed a grave threat to crops and livelihoods. The locusts are known to hunt in hordes and can eat food equal to their body weight. Each swarm has about 80 lakh locusts and it can finish the food that about 2,500 people will finish in a day.
Similarly, the Quran too mentions locusts saying Allah punished Egypt with five different plagues: the flood, locusts, lice, frogs and blood.
In the Quran, verse 133 of Chapter 7 says:
'So We let loose upon them the flood, and the locusts, and the lice, and the frogs, and blood¡ªall explicit signs ¡ª but they were too arrogant. They were a sinful people.'
The ¡°Desert" episode of the stunning BBC documentary series Planet Earth II (2017)¡ªexplains the threat of pestilence locusts carry:
In India, locusts have already wiped out more than 5,00,000 hectares of crops in Rajasthan ¨C the worst-affected state as per the ministry. Gujarat too has been battling locust infestation for more than five months now. In Madhya Pradesh, locust swarms have been spotted in 16 of its 52 districts. In Uttar Pradesh, Jhansi, Agra, and Noida districts have reported locust sightings.
Locusts belong to the family of grasshoppers and are usually harmless but certain environmental conditions like monsoon and heavy cyclones make them reproduce faster. The swarm is highly mobile and covers 50 to more than 100 km in a day. "There is a continuous locust invasion from Pakistan. It is not a new problem and we had been facing it for a long time. This year, the locust attack is worse in 26 years. However, a coordinated effort has been made to curb its spread," a senior official from the Faridabad-headquartered LWO told news agency PTI.
According to the UN body Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the locust attack poses a threat to food security of the affected countries as an adult locust can eat a quantity equal to its weight of about 2 grams every single day.
A single square kilometre of the swarm can contain somewhere between 4 to 8 crore adult locusts. Every single day, if they cover 130-150 km, they can eat the food consumed by as many as 35,000 people, it said.
