Passover

(Exodus 11:1 - 12:33)

Jehovah told Moses, "I shall bring one more plague down upon the Pharaoh and Egypt, and after that he will not only let you go, but will expel you.  Announce to all the people that every man and woman should procure from his neighbors vessels and jewelry of gold and silver."

(Jehovah had caused the Israelites to acquire a favorable reputation among the Egyptian people, and Moses was held in high regard by the Pharaoh's court and by the common people of Egypt as well.)

Moses announced to the Pharaoh, "Jehovah says, 'At midnight I will go abroad through the land of Egypt.  All the firstborn children in Egypt will then perish, from the firstborn of the Pharaoh who sits upon the throne to the firstborn of the servant girl who grinds corn upon the millstone -- even the firstborn of the animals.  There shall be an wailing outcry such there has never been in the land of Egypt nor will be again.  But among the Israelites there will be nary a murmur among men or beasts; not even a dog will bark. You will then see the clear distinction I, Jehovah, am making between Egypt and Israel.’ All those who serve the Pharaoh will bow down before me.  They will beg me, ‘Leave and take your followers with you!’  Then, only then, will I depart.”  And Moses, very angry, withdrew from the Pharaoh.

Jehovah told Moses, "The Pharaoh will not heed your words, compelling me to perform more miracles in Egypt.”

Moses and Aaron accomplished all the miracles in the Pharaoh’s presence, but Jehovah made the Pharaoh stubborn and he continued to refuse to let the Israelites leave the country.

Jehovah spoke to Moses and Aaron in Egypt.  "This month will be observed by you as the beginning of the year; this will be the first month in the year.  Inform all the assembled people of Israel. 'On the tenth of this month each man must take a lamb for his family, one for each household.  If the family is too small to eat an entire lamb then it will share with that of his next-door neighbor.  (Divide the meat according to the number of people and how much each will eat.)  The lamb must be perfect, a yearling male.  It may be a lamb, or it may be a goat kid.  It shall be carefully penned till the fourteenth of the month and then, at sundown, all the people of Israel en masse will slaughter their lamb (or kid).  Each shall take the blood of the lamb and smear it over the door posts and the lintel of the house in which the lamb will be eaten.  That night they shall dine on the roasted lamb with unleavened bread and bitter herbs.  (Don't eat it raw or boiled, but roast it whole on a spit over a fire.)  You will save nothing of the lamb, and any left-overs should be burned before morning.  When you eat it, you must do so in this manner: with your robe belted up, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand.  You should eat it quickly; this is Jehovah's Passover.  For this is the night when I will pass through the land of Egypt and kill all the firstborn, both man and beast and exact punishment upon the gods of Egypt -- I am Jehovah!”

“The blood on the house will be a sign that you are residing there.  When I see it, I will pass over you and spare you from the deadly plague that I will be inflicting upon the land of Egypt.” 

“For you this will be a day of remembrance and you will commemorate it throughout the ages as a feast day for Jehovah.  Your descendants will observe it forever as a part of religious law.  For seven days you will eat unleavened bread.  On the first day all leaven must be removed from your house and anyone who eats anything leavened during the seven days will be expelled from the community of Israelites."

"On the first day of Passover and again on the seventh day there will be a religious convocation.  On these days you will do no work at all except that necessary for the preparation of meals.  You will hold a feast of unleavened bread, as a remembrance of the day when I brought out of Egypt the assembled nation of Israel.  This day will be established as a religious festival and will be celebrated down through the ages.  From the evening of 14th day of the month until the evening of the 21st you will eat only unleavened bread.  For seven days no leaven must be found in your homes and whoever eats anything leavened, that person, whether he be a native or a foreigner, will be expelled from the community of the Israelites.  You will eat nothing leavened; wherever you may be living you must eat nothing but unleavened bread."

Moses convened the elders of Israel and told them, “Each family, pick out a lamb and slaughter it as a sacrifice for Passover.  Dip a hyssop branch into a basin of lamb’s blood and sprinkle the blood on the lintel and on both the door posts.  None of you must leave your houses till morning.  Jehovah will be passing through killing Egyptians, but when he sees the blood on the lintel and the  door posts, he will pass over those thresholds and bar the assassin from entering your houses and killing you.”

“You will henceforth observe this tradition as law among your descendants for all time to come.  When you settle in the land that Jehovah has promised us, you will keep this practice.  When it happens that your children will question you, 'What does this custom mean?'  You will tell them, 'It is the sacrifice to honor Jehovah's Passover, when he passed over the houses of the Israelites, sparing us while he killed the Egyptians.'"  And the people of Israel bowed their heads and prayed.  They then departed and did as Jehovah had commanded Moses and Aaron.

And so at midnight Jehovah put to death all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of the Pharaoh that sat on the throne to the firstborn of the prisoner in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock.  The Pharaoh got up in the middle of the night, as did his court and all his subjects.  There was a huge outcry in Egypt, for there wasn't a single house in which there was not at least one death. 

During the night the Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron and told them, "Get out and be gone from my people, both you and the rest of the Israelites.  Go worship your Jehovah as you wanted!  And take your herds and your flocks with you, as you wanted.  Just go -- and ask your god to bless me!”

The Egyptian people were eager to send the Israelites out of their country as soon as possible, for, as they said, "Otherwise, we’ll all be dead men!"

Notes
1.  Some of this section of the narrative seems disjointed, repetitive, even out of sequence (eg. the reference in the second sentence to the gold and silver vessels should come later in the narrative.)

2.  It is noted that Moses has acquired a reputation among the Egyptians.  You could understand how they could fear or hate the man who has brought about the almost total destruction of their country, but think highly of him?  Since he was the instrument by which his god had inflicted these catastrophic plagues, it is a great wonder he was not the target of mob violence.  How could they be kindly disposed to him?  Even the Pharaoh did not make good on his promise to put him to death if he ever appeared again at court.  Of course keeping promises wasn't this Pharaoh's strong point.

3.  The Tenth Plague planned by Jehovah involves perhaps the greatest act of wanton mass murder in the world's bloody history, the slaughter of the firstborn offspring of every Egyptian.  While the Hebrew word “bechor" is usually rendered "firstborn,” the eldest child, it can also mean, figuratively, the choice, the best, the strongest.  The biblical authors, though, probably meant it in a literal sense, this act of wholesale murder being the fulfillment of Jehovah's promise to kill the Egyptian firstborn because they had threatened the children of Israel, whom he regarded as his firstborn.  However much the act seems dependent upon miracle or supernatural magic, explanations abound to account for the death of the firstborn.  It has been pointed out that some diseases, the bubonic plague among them, often seem to strike the fittest rather than the weakest or affect the young rather than the old.  Contaminated food supplies may have been consumed more by the favored, eldest child than by the younger children, thus causing them to come down with fatal diseases more often.  Noxious gases emanating from the Nile have been blamed for causing instant, overnight death.  These and other more exotic explanations come far short of accounting for what is more easily and accurately explained by the near certainty that the death of the firstborn simply didn’t happen -- it is a fictional invention to illustrate the themes of the story.

4.  The death of the firstborn includes animals.  What animals could possibly remain after their complete (and repeated) extermination by the previous plagues -- house cats?

5.  If such an event as the death of the firstborn did really take place, it is puzzling that it was never recorded by Egyptian historians.  In fact, the plagues of Egypt, while part of traditional history of the people of the northern Kingdom of Israel, are not even mentioned by the prophets of the southern Kingdom of Judah.  It has been suggested that the plagues were, in fact, a late addition to Hebrew legendary history.  (Indeed, if all the plagues occurred as they do in Exodus, in the space of less than a year, Egypt would have soon ceased to exist -- no drinkable water, no crops, no food, no livestock, and most of its people dead.)

6.  The ceremony of the Passover meal (or seder) is herein described.  One wonders if Jehovah, or Moses, simply thought of the menu off the top of his head.  The symbolic significance of the unleavened bread, the bitter herbs, and so forth is evident, but it would have significance only as a commemoration.  The story seems an explanation for the origin of a later custom, rather like an apocryphal story about Jesus putting decorations on a pine tree.   Passover, of course, remains as an important Jewish holiday and, many of the faith observe the rituals meticulously. 

7.  Jehovah, who, so far, has demanded practically nothing of his followers in regard to their moral conduct, has become very zealous about dietary restrictions and ceremonial observances.  It is interesting that you may commit mass murder, sell your brother into slavery, have sex with your step-mother, lie, cheat, and steal and still be a part of the Hebrew community, but if you eat bread with a little yeast in it at the wrong time of the year, you’re kicked to the curb.

8.  The smearing of goat's blood on the door posts and lintels is similar to many folk traditions intended to ward off evil spirits from the threshold of the house.

9.  The means by which the Tenth Plague is accomplished is left vague -- for a reason: it it not really explainable.  Did Jehovah send out an army of angels to enter every residence in Egypt?  How many households might have existed in Egypt at that time?  It seems likely the population of Egypt would have been at least a couple million people, minus, though, the considerable number who must have perished during the previous plagues.  An army spread out over the country, even an invisible one, would be strained to accomplish the task.  The instrument, if not "human,” must have been intelligent because it had to figure out who was the firstborn in each household and, more than that, to determine what animals were firstborn and then put them all to death -- how?  If this holocaust was accomplished by some miraculous means, the will of God making it so, why then would God have any difficulty discerning what houses were occupied by Israelites?  (He was able to enter an Egyptian house and immediately recognize whether the pet dog was firstborn or not.)  Also, it should be pointed out that the Israelites all lived in Goshen, removed from the native Egyptians, so why was this even necessary?  But very little of this absurd story makes sense or can pass any test of logical, let alone, historic credibility.

10.  The instrument of death, whatever or whoever it was, needed that lamb's blood on the door in order to know what houses to pass over.  Why the requirement to slaughter some poor lamb in order to get blood to mark the threshold?  Why the complicated ceremonial rigmarole?  Why not just ask every Israelite to put an "X" or something on the door?  The answer is this: all religions and cults and secret societies devise complex, sometimes symbolic, sometimes meaningless rituals in order to nurture a sense of community (we, and only we, do this) and also to cultivate the mindset of unquestioning obedience. 

11.  On this one fateful night a whole lot happens.  The Israelites have their Passover seder, the firstborn of Egypt are all put to death, the entire population of the country (spread out over many hundreds of miles up and down the Nile) raise an outcry that the Pharaoh hears, the Pharaoh summons and receives Moses and Aaron (who seem to need no travel time at all between the Pharaoh’s capital and Goshen), and, as we shall see in the next section, the Israelites all get up, pack their bags, loot their neighbors, and are ready to embark upon an exodus to literally God knows where.  This is a dramatic compression of time that is simply jaw dropping.

12.  At some point one must ask why Jehovah has chosen to champion among all the peoples of the world this obscure tribe of barbaric nomads, whose leaders have generally been of devious and despicable character, while  all but destroying the great civilization of Egypt, whose monumental achievements in architecture, art, engineering, and social organization were triumphs of the ancient world.  What sort of values does Jehovah have?  Is he interested at all in fostering man's development or in the advancement of civilization, or does he merely want to dominate a flock of docile and obedient sheep and find means and excuses to satisfy his bloodlust?

13.  The unleavened bread of Passover, the Jewish matzah or matzo, flat, firm, and wafer-like, is bread made without yeast, a fungal microorganism that makes bread “rise.”  Yeast was first used by the ancient Egyptians, who were great bread makers.

14.  Hyssop is, in modern usage, a mint plant.  The biblical hyssop has not been positively identified, but its branches were used in purification rites.