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.
Ver. 8. Sprinkle it toward the heaven.] In token that this plague should, in a special manner, be inflicted from heaven. The Philistines, by their golden emerods, acknowledged that the emerods in their flesh were from God. Hippocrates called the pestilence το θειον, the divine disease, as we call the spots thereof God's marks. The falling sickness was anciently called morbus sacer as an immediate hand of God. And what can we conceive less of the sweating sickness, with which no stranger in England was touched? And yet the English were chased therewith, not only in England, but in other countries abroad; which made them, like tyrants, both feared and avoided wherever they came. a
a Life of King Edward VI, by Sir John Heywood, p. 127.