But if you refuse is very explicit here (unlike 4.23), so this implies that the Pharaoh is given an opportunity to agree to the demand and thus avoid the plague. Let them go, of course, refers to “my people,” the Israelites, in verse 1, so Good News Translation omits this. In a number of languages it will be necessary to repeat the phrase to let them go, as Revised Standard Version and New International Version do.

Behold is omitted in Good News Translation because it is archaic, but it may be rendered as “I warn you” (New American Bible). I will plague uses the emphatic pronoun I and the participle of the verb meaning “to injure,” or “to strike.” (The same root word is used again in 12.13 as a noun.) It does not refer to a disease, as the English word may suggest. If one is unable to find a suitable word for plague, it may be better to follow Good News Translation (and others) and translate the contextual meaning as “punish.”

All your country refers to all the land under the rule of the Pharaoh, the entire land of Egypt. With frogs goes with I will plague, meaning “I will send a plague of frogs” (New American Bible). Good News Translation rephrases the whole clause, including all your country: “I will punish your country by covering it with frogs.” Contemporary English Version has a slightly different rendering: “I will cover his entire country with frogs.” In languages where translators will find it difficult to translate the embedded quotations in 7.25–8.2, and where indirect speech will be more natural style, the following is an alternative translation model:

• Seven days after the LORD had changed the Nile River into blood, he said to Moses, “Go into the palace and tell the king that I [Yahweh] order him to release my people so that they can worship me. If he refuses to release them, then tell him that I will punish his whole country by covering it with frogs….”

Quoted with permission from Osborn, Noel D. and Hatton, Howard A. A Handbook on Exodus. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 1999. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .