BLOODY POSTS: THE 10th PLAGUE
Questions: In the tenth and final plague, why did G-d tell the Israelites to paint their lintels and doorposts with blood? Why does G-d command the Israelites to offer a sacrifice even before the liberation begins?
Key Verses:
Exodus 12:3 Speak to the entire assembly of Israel and say to them: On the tenth of this month, they should take for themselves a lamb, for each fathers’ house, a lamb for every household
12:6 And it will be preserved until the 14th day of this month; and the whole assembly of Israel will slaughter it in the afternoon
12:7 And they will take from the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel, on the houses where they eat within
12:13 And the blood will be a sign for you on the houses where you are, and I will see the blood and pass over you; and there will be no plague for the destroyer when I smite the land of Egypt
12:23 And G-d will pass to smite Egypt and He will see the blood on the lintel and two doorposts; then, G-d will pass over the door and not allow the destroyer to come into your houses to smite you
The crescendo of the plagues is the eradication of the Egyptian firstborn. The countryside is already reeling from plague after plague of attacks focused on the food and water supply, to the point where fish, animals and harvests have already been decimated. This is now a nation that must be worried about its very survival, since where tomorrow’s bread, fish and meat will come from is no longer certain. But G-d has not targeted the people. There has been no loss of life to this point (that we know of). That’s about to change. G-d is about to wipe out a significant percentage of the Egyptian population in one fell swoop, changing lives in every household forever. Fear of tomorrow will be replaced overnight by fear of today.
The Israelites are commanded to offer sacrifices, the inaugural Korban Pesach, Passover sacrifice. G-d commands them to take from the sacrificed animal’s blood and make markings on the doorposts and lintels of their homes in order that G-d identify the home as Israelite and pass over it on his night of killing.
Obviously, G-d doesn’t need the markings. What is this all about? Why instruct the people to do this? Some of the commentators alight on 12:13 where the verse says, “A sign for you,” showing that the blood is for the people to participate in the plague. But the people, other than Moses and Aaron, have not participated in any other plague, why should they be involved in this, the most deadly one?
Firstly, G-d wants the people to be active in this plague to show their allegiance to Him. It’s one thing for G-d to liberate the nation, but He wants to know who’s on board. One can assume many doubters still existed amongst the people, who believed the plagues were acts of nature, coincidences or just didn’t believe in any impending liberation. One can assume a percentage of people was still hostile to Moses, who didn’t grow up among them and suffer through slavery. Would such people follow G-d’s command? Likely not. This is put-up-or-shut-up time. G-d wants to know who is with Him. It’s those people who will be provided with immunity from the plague and given salvation. It’s clearly not enough just to be an Israelite.
Secondly, it seems G-d wants the people involved to empower them and give their collective self-confidence a boost, which will be needed for the challenges ahead, challenges involved with traveling to a new life in a new country. G-d tells the people to request reparations from the Egyptians. G-d could have made wealth available through miracles. The nation could have discovered a gold mine in the Sinai desert. But He wants the people to take control of their own lives. However, He doesn’t want them to start a slave rebellion and start slaughtering the Egyptians in their beds. That would turn them into savages. Becoming the nation that inherits the Torah would be problematic with so much blood on their hands. G-d has a better plan. He’ll take care of the retribution.
But why the blood? Why not something else? Blood has enormous significance. It’s the sign of death but also of birth. It’s also the sign of life. All of these themes are in play during the night of the final plague. It’s interesting that the command of spreading the blood on the doorposts and lintels is only for one’s residence, as it says in 12:7: “…on the houses where they eat within.”
In an aside, this seems to indicate that various residents of the slave area had more than one building in which they spent time. Does this mean there was an independent slave economy with tailors, cobblers, doctors, midwives, shopkeepers and bakers operating their own shops? It’s an easy to overlook insight into the life of the Israelite slaves. The text also reveals to us that the slaves lived in some kind of house, rather than in prison-like slave quarters or dormitories. One automatically assumes the Israelites lived in Goshen, but then why tell the people to apply the blood to their homes? If they are in a separate neighborhood, the angel of G-d wouldn’t have to pass over them at all. It can be inferred, therefore, that the Israelites lived in neighborhoods where there were many Egyptians.
The presence and accessibility of thousands of lambs to be offered in sacrifice to G-d also indicates there were numerous shepherds. It’s hard to get a sense of the backbreaking labor and oppression when you consider this, but the Bible clearly says that the Children of Israel were slaves: “They put over them taskmasters to torture them with suffering” (1:11), “But the more they tortured them…” (1:12), “And Egypt enslaved the Children of Israel with intense labor” (1:13), “And they made their lives bitter with hard work” (1:14).
To summarize, the tenth and final plague is about to occur and the Children of Israel are instructed to offer sacrifices and paint the entrances to their houses with blood in order to be spared from the murder of the first-born children within. Therefore, once the plague had concluded and the people who survived were ready to depart Egypt and be liberated, they had to walk through the blood red doorposts and lintels. Would a person walking through not associate this act as symbolic of exiting a birth canal? Liberation is freedom, the beginning of life. What better way to symbolically mark it than walking through a blood marked doorway?
It’s strange that the Israelites are instructed to offer the Passover sacrifice prior to their liberation. The original plan, as repeated to Pharaoh, was for them to go offer tribute to their G-d in the form of sacrifices in the desert, not in Egypt. As well, it makes a lot more sense for the people to offer gratitude to G-d after they are given freedom, not before. What’s going on here?
The Passover sacrifice is the first act of freedom the people, as a nation, will undertake. Up until now, Pharaoh has forbidden them from going to worship G-d in the wilderness. Ostensibly, offering a public sacrifice to a foreign deity on Egyptian soil would never be tolerated. Nobody would ever contemplate doing such a thing. It’s the ultimate affront to Pharaoh and the Egyptian people. But G-d wants the people to know they’re no longer taking orders from the Egyptians. The centuries of servitude are about to end. It has to occur in Egypt, right under Pharaoh’s nose.
For an Egyptian, who emerges from his house in anguish and grief over the death of one or more family members, he would look at the Israelite homes and be accosted by a sight as nothing he’d ever seen. Since every household offered a sacrifice, there would be pools of blood all over the ground throughout the neighborhood from the previous day. Sacrifices aren’t clean operations. Blood is everywhere. Thousands of lambs have been slaughtered. Then, every Israelite home would have bloodstains on it. It would enhance the impression of the massacre the Egyptians suffered. All they would see is death. And in fact, although the slaves were now gone, the rows of empty homes would put death in the air, in a ghost town created overnight. The impact on the Egyptians must have been catastrophic. It’s no wonder they had no difficulty giving away their valuables to the Israelites, who only had to ask politely. Many people are skeptical that the Egyptians parted with their wealth so easily, but when one considers everything that was occurring, it becomes very plausible. They were petrified.
Only by commanding the Israelites to sacrifice and paint their doorways in blood could G-d have achieved such a knockout punch to the Egyptians’ senses.