God Passed Through Egypt Himself on Passover Night

The Night No Intermediary Was Sent

The text of Exodus says it three times, and each repetition was deliberate. I will pass through the land of Egypt that night. I and not an angel. I will smite all the firstborn. I and not a seraph. I and not a messenger. The tradition read the triple repetition as a correction of any assumption that on the night of the tenth plague, as on every other night of the plagues, God had worked through agents. On this night, He worked alone. Whatever passed through Egypt in the darkness, entering every house where the doorpost was not marked, taking the firstborn of man and beast, was not a representative. It was the source.

One of the midrashic readings of the night makes this concrete by describing the problem Pharaoh created for himself. He had instructed his household that he would not be seen attending to bodily functions in public, claiming divine status that placed him above such things. He went to the Nile before dawn so that no one would see him. God told Moses to go to the Nile at that hour and confront him there, forcing Pharaoh to encounter the messenger of the God he denied while performing the human function he was pretending not to have. The plagues were designed to dismantle specific pretensions, not merely to punish a nation.

What Happened at Midnight

The Egyptians had tried to prepare. When Moses announced that the firstborn would be struck, some Egyptian parents took their firstborn sons out of their own homes and hid them in the houses of neighbors, thinking the curse applied to the building rather than the person. Those children died in the houses where they were hidden. Some Egyptian firstborn sons tried to escape by hiding in Israelite homes, because the blood of the Passover lamb was marked on the doorposts and they thought the marking would protect anyone inside. Those children died in Israelite homes. The protection followed the household of Israel wherever it was located. It did not extend to the Egyptians who sheltered under it. Every house in Egypt that did not belong to an Israelite family was shaken by death that night, from the firstborn of Pharaoh on his throne to the firstborn of the prisoner in the dungeon pit.

The Egyptian firstborn who were still alive when the night ended were themselves transformed by what they had survived. They went to Pharaoh and demanded that he release Israel. When he refused, they went into the streets and began killing their own compatriots, Egyptian firstborns striking down Egyptians who were not firstborn, in a frenzy of grief and rage at what had been permitted to happen to them. The text in Psalms that says God struck the Egyptians refers, in this reading, partly to what surviving Egyptians did to each other after the night was over.

The Hyssop and What It Bound Together

God's instruction for marking the doorposts specified hyssop, a small, unremarkable plant. The midrash read the choice of hyssop as intentional commentary. Hyssop was the humblest plant in Israel's botanical vocabulary, the lowest growing, the least impressive. Cedar was the most impressive. The ritual of the red heifer used both. The purification from leprosy used both. Whenever cedar and hyssop appeared together in a rite, the message was the same: greatness requires its counterweight. The cedar that towers must remember the hyssop at ground level or it has not understood what height is for.

The Hebrew word for the bundle of hyssop, agudat, shares a root with the word for association or gathering. God tells Moses to take a bundle of hyssop. The midrash reads this as God saying, I will render you an association for myself. The physical act of binding the hyssop into a bundle, dipping it in blood, and marking the doorposts was also an act of binding the people to God in a new covenant of presence. The blood was the seal. The hyssop was the pen. The doorpost was the parchment. Every Israelite household that night was inscribed into a relationship that the plagues and the crossing of the sea and the revelation at Sinai would flesh out over the following months, but whose first inscription was made by a bunch of weeds dipped in lamb's blood.

The Firstborn Who Were Spared

Not all firstborn Egyptians died. The tradition preserved in Shemot Rabbah, a Palestinian midrash from around the fifth century CE, records that any Egyptian firstborn who had shown kindness to an Israelite, who had given shelter or spoken against the oppression, was passed over in the night. The decree that swept through Egypt was not indiscriminate. The same hand that had protected Israel behind the blood on the doorposts recognized Egyptians who had aligned themselves, even silently, with the people being liberated. The night of the tenth plague was not a night of collective punishment. It was a night of precise accounting, and the precision moved in both directions.

There were Egyptians among the mixed multitude that left Egypt. People who had seen enough to want to follow. They are mentioned only briefly in the Exodus text and almost never in the telling of the story, but they were there, walking out with the Israelites into the desert, carrying their own reasons for leaving a country that had permitted what it had permitted.