Now it was in the middle of the night:
YHWH struck down every firstborn in the land of Egypt,
from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sits on his throne . . . Exodus 12:29
It's easy for people to look back in history at atrocities and see them as anything but real people being killed, real people dying, their pain and suffering, the suffering of those who survived them. It is one of the great things about the Jewish Scriptures that they don't soften the blow of their descriptions but present even things that look harsh to us, today, in quite brutal terms. It's one of the things the enemies of Jews have used against them, their admitting even the most troubling of things in their historical-religious narrative and accepting guilt for wrongdoing. As Marilynne Robinson pointed out, they even accepted moral culpability for having lived in the path of conquering armies on their way to conquer other lands.
If there is one thing you can say about the Jewish scriptures, they take reality very seriously in ways that secularism refuses to.
That passage goes on to say that in the Passover, God killed the first born of every Egyptian down to that of the captive in prison to the first born of all of their cattle. Which seems pretty unfair, considering captives were unlikely, in most cases, to have benefitted from the oppression and enslavement of the Egyptians and the cattle were no less exploited than the Children of Israel - though they were an economic asset of the Egyptian state.
The six environmental plagues that preceded that final one of the deaths of the first-born, hadn't made Pharaoh relent and giving up the slaves that produced and maintained his wealth and power, it wasn't until his first-born, his heir, the continuation of his dynasty that he not only let the Children of Israel go and establish a new economic-political order one which served God and not Pharaoh. It took that to make him relent where the devastation of the land and water and food supply of Egypt didn't.
It occured to me while thinking about the story that maybe you can't understand that last plague without considering that Pharaoh, in the beginning of the story, orders his own slaughter of more than just the first-born of the Hebrews, his order to kill all of the male children born to them. It's something to consider that Abraham Lincoln wondered if God willed that every drop of blood that was shed by the slave-masters's lash be matched by blood shed in the Civil War. I'm not sure God willed such a thing but the story of the death of the first-born must have reminded those who first heard it as part of their religious liturgy that Pharaoh had ordered a more extensive slaughter. And that the hardness of heart which the scribes who set down the stories attributed to God didn't end there because no sooner had the Children of Israel fled slavery than Pharaoh reverted to old habits and went to bring them back into slavery. Even that last event wasn't enough to change his heart and it ended up destroying him and his military-police - though it took another miracle to do that.
In the story nothing but his own death, not even that of HIS first born stopped Pharaoh who would certainly have reimposed all of his worst edicts against the Children of Israel again, just the Civil War didn't end real slavery, the vestiges of which are still with us, the alliance of slave-power and the financial money men who first imposed the sin of slavery on the United States, embedding it into the very Constitution, are in power now.
If the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, Title Nine, the Americans With Disabilities Acts were seen as some kind of liberation - well, Pharaoh is taking all that back now. Who knows how many they'll take down in the flood that is sure to come, this time.
I've written this about the school shootings that already number about 20 this year less than two-months old without referring to it once. But that's what this is about, that and the tens of thousands of others that you never hear about except in the local news. That's a product of induced paranoia, not at all different than what led Pharaoh onto the path to his own destruction. The road we're on too.
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