Exodus 9:32 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

For they were not grown up— Margin of our Bibles—were hidden or dark. Bochart reads it, for they were not yet eared. Parkhurst, from Fuller, upon the word [אפל] apel, observes, that hidden, its true meaning, here signifies concealed, or involved in the hose or blade: for Pliny informs us, that, in Egypt, barley is cut in the sixth month after sowing, bread-corn the seventh; barley-harvest being in April, wheat and rye in May. In the plague of hail, therefore, the stalks of barley, being become pretty hard and stiff, resisted the hail, and so were broken off; whereas the wheat-stalks, being tender and flexible, gently yielded to the stroke of the hail, and so escaped its violence, and preserved the wheat in the hose. This interpretation agrees with Bochart. The wheat and rye here mentioned were not such as we use. The wheat is supposed by some to be a kind of grain, which the Greeks call spelt; and Dr. Shaw supposes the word, which we render rye, to signify rice. See Travels, p. 407. But the author of the Observations is of a different opinion from him and the forementioned expositors. "Dr. Pococke," says he, "has made a remark which I have observed in no other traveller, namely, that there is a double seed-time and harvest in Egypt: rice, Indian-wheat, and another sort, which produces a large cane, and has an ear like millet, (which they call the corn of Damascus, and in Italian surgo rosso,) being sown and reaped at a very different time from wheat, (which in that country, it seems, is all bearded,) barley, and flax. The first, he says, are sown in March, before the Nile overflows the land, and reaped about October; whereas the wheat and barley are sown in November and December as soon as the Nile is gone off, and they are reaped before May. Dr. Shaw seems not to have been aware of this, who supposes that rice was sown at the same time with flax, wheat, and barley; yet it seems natural, that as wheat and barley are sown as soon as the inundation is over, and reaped before it returns, so those sorts of grain, which require much water, should be sown before it begins, and be reaped just as it finishes: and though I have met with no direct observation of this kind, yet Norden confirms one part of it; for he tells us, that he saw a great plain, covered with Turkey-wheat, the 20th of November, which began to be ripe, and that he saw the Arabs cutting their harvest in a neighbouring plain the 29th of that month. If then this be fact, it will explain, very determinately, what is meant by the wheat and rye's being dark or hidden at the time of the plague of hail, Exodus 9:32 for it must mean that they were sown, but not come up; contrary to the opinion of Dr. Shaw, who supposes that the expression imports, that they were of a dark green, and consequently yielded without hurt; while the barley and the flax, being forwarder, were destroyed. This will also shew what the wheat was which, being hidden in the earth, escaped: it was Indian-wheat, or surgo rosso, which sort of wheat, with the rye, escaped; while the barley, the wheat bearded like barley, and the flax, were smitten."