Lenora Ramsey had just moved to Florida, so she was shocked when she opened her garage and discovered hundreds of tiny frogs hopping happily about. The frogs immediately made her think of the end of the world.
“Is this one of those apocalyptic event things?” she captioned her viral TikTok, which has gained over 5M views.
“We just moved to Florida, and as you can see, we are currently undergoing some sort of infestation of sorts. They’re everywhere, all over, in everything. And, they just keep coming in the waves of masses!” she exclaimed as she filmed every inch of the baby frogs taking over her garage.
Ramsey received the plague with equanimity, putting out a bowl of water for the frogs.
“I set this up because I don’t want them to die, I’m not that person,” she said. “Apparently I’m a frog mom now.”
The plague of frogs was short-lived, appearing within two hours.
“I cleaned our garage today, and this wasn’t like this. This happened about an hour and a half ago. There are [now] hundreds, if not a thousand in here.”
The froggies began leaving the next day.
“I guess I was just an overnight stop, because most of them are gone,” she posted to TikTok.
Jewish sources predict that the plagues that struck Egypt will reappear in the final Redemption but in even more powerful forms. This reload of the Egyptian plagues was prophesied by Micah.
I will show him wondrous deeds As in the days when You sallied forth from the land of Egypt. Micah 7:15
It is also written in Midrash Tanchuma, homiletic teachings collected around the fifth century, that “just as God struck the Egyptians with 10 plagues, so too He will strike the enemies of the Jewish people at the time of the Redemption.”
This concept was explained by Rabbi Bahya ben Asher, a 13th-century Spanish commentator, who wrote, “In Egypt, God used only part of His strength. When the final redemption comes, God will show much more His power.”
But a rerun of the plague of frogs will require a miracle. A global team of 41 scientists announced in 2019 that humans have unwittingly spread the chytrid fungi Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) and Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans (Bsal) around the world, causing a sharp decline of at least 501 amphibian species, or about one out of every 16 known to science. 90 of the amphibian species have gone extinct or are presumed extinct in the wild. Another 124 species have declined by more than 90 percent.
“Chytrid fungus is the most destructive pathogen ever described by science—that’s a pretty shocking realization,” wrote biologist Wendy Palen in an article in Science.
If God ever decides to bring back the Biblical plagues as a precursor to the Messiah, an infestation will surely stand in sharp contrast to the current dearth of frogs.
