The Tenth Plague

Welcome back to another edition of The Theological Deep End, where Thursday beit midrash/House of Study becomes a place to grapple with some of the hardest stuff in Torah!

(Come on, admit it, you love it.)

(But really, if you’d like me to hone in a liiiitle less on the hardest stuff all the time, we can do that, too. Let me know? Really? I just heard from some folks who were hoping there’d be time to unpack this in particular…)

So, yeah.

The final plague—the death of the firstborn son—is the one that many find to be the most ethically challenging, for good reason. What appears in the text to be divinely-ordained killing in any context is difficult to grasp, let alone…. that of children.

(This may be a good time to remember that we can talk about the character of God in these stories as separate from God Godself, if that resonates for you—as it does for me, and others in my tradition. You are under no obligation to, of course, but it’s an option to understand God as depicted in these stories in metaphoric terms.)

On the most surface level, one can understand this plague on the poetic or literary level as what commentators refer to as midah k’neged midah, measure for measure—a sense of what goes around, comes around. Like, since Pharaoh ordained the mass murder of the Israelite sons, some Egyptian sons are taken.

The Book of Exodus was, of course, thousands of years before the Enlightenment, and individualism. The notion that members of a society were treated as part of a collective may have made more sense to the Biblical perspective than it does to ours.

But that doesn’t mean that this plague isn’t especially troubling or that it doesn’t merit consideration! Let’s look at some commentary, shall we?

• Do some or any of these explanations make sense to you? Resonate with you?
• What critiques do you offer?
• Are there other ways that you can make sense of this plague?
• If not—if you are team No Way No How/I Hate This, and you’re God and the 9th plague has happened and You’re stuck, what do You do? (We’ll get to the heart hardening business next week, so assume that’s not a factor.) What do YOU suggest is going to be the thing that gets Pharaoh to finally let the Israelites go? What is effective justice, here?