And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you. —Book of Joel, Ch. 2:25

Steven Weitzman, director of the Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program at IUB and an expert on the Hebrew Bible and the religious and literary traditions it inspired, says that timing is the key difference between the modern cicada visitation and the locust plague of Moses’s day.

“The locusts coming our way return on a recurring schedule, a 17-year cycle. During the Exodus, they arrived unexpectedly, as part of a larger sequence of 10 plagues, and are interpreted by the Bible as God’s way of pressuring the Egyptian king to let the Israelites go. The book of Joel, was one of the minor prophets, also interprets a plague of locusts as a sign of divine agency, a pressure tactic used by God to encourage the Israelites to repent of their sins,” Weitzman said.

In the modern era, insect invasions have been the stuff of which nightmares are made, in that they are a staple of science fiction literature and film. According to Dewitt Douglas Kilgore, associate professor of English at IUB, the alien invasions of “bug-eyed monsters” became very popular in the films of the 1950s.

“At the time, there was heightened concern about atomic radiation, the Cold War and political invasion. In the films, when nature is out of balance, a natural phenomenon can represent a magnified danger. This is also true in more recent films, such as Aliens and even the first Lord of the Rings movie, where the orcs are insect-like, swarm and make chittering noises,” he said. “Insects—bugs—are a metaphor for aliens in these works. If the attacking aliens are not snakes, they are insects.”

Related stories:

Researchers prepare for 17-year cicada onslaught
Everything you ever wanted to know about these critters
Brood X cicadas will cause limited damage to trees, yard plants