Holly Bible - KJV with Concise Commentaries by Z Selam - HTML preview
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The Plague of Boils
8 And the Lord said unto Moses and unto Aaron, Take to you
handfuls of ashes of the furnace, and let Moses sprinkle it toward the heaven in the sight of Pharaoh.
When they were not wrought upon by the death of their cattle, God sent a plague that seized their own bodies, and touched them to the quick. If less judgments do not do their work, God will send greater. Let us therefore humble ourselves under the mighty hand of God, and go forth to meet him in the way of his judgments, that his anger may be turned away from us.
The signal by which this plague was summoned was the sprinkling of warm ashes from the furnace, towards heaven (Ex 9:8,10), which was to signify the heating of the air with such an infection as should produce in the bodies of the Egyptians sore boils, which would be both noisome and painful. Immediately upon the scattering of the ashes, a scalding dew came down out of the air, which blistered wherever it fell. Note, Sometimes God shows men their sin in their punishment; they had oppressed Israel in the furnaces, and now the ashes of the furnace are made as much a terror to them as ever their task-masters had been to the Israelites.
The plague itself was very grievous--a common eruption would be so, especially to the nice and delicate, but these eruptions were inflammations, like Job's. This is afterwards called the botch of Egypt (De 28:27), as if it were some new disease, never heard of before, and known ever after by that name, Note, Sores in the body are to be looked upon as the punishments of sin, and to be hearkened to as calls to repentance.