God Passed Through Egypt Himself on Passover Night

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A Bunch of Weeds and Two Bloods

The instruction was odd enough that people repeated it in the street. Take a bunch of hyssop, the lowest weed in the country, the one that comes out of a wall. Tie it. Dip it in the basin. Wipe blood across the lintel and down both doorposts. Then go inside, shut the door, and do not come out until morning.

The lintel stood for Abraham. The two posts stood for Isaac and Jacob. Every house in the slave quarter was being framed that night in the merit of three dead men, and the blood on the frame was two bloods, the lamb killed that afternoon and the blood of circumcision, which is why every man in the camp had gone under the knife before the meal.

They ate standing, sandals on, staffs in hand. Nothing could be left over. Nothing anyone could come back for in the daylight.

The Boys Left in Hebrew Houses

Moses had said it plainly and publicly: every firstborn in Egypt was going to die. Some Egyptians laughed at him. Some did not.

The ones who did not came down to the slave quarter after dark carrying their sons. They knocked on the doors of people they owned. "Take this one," they said. "Let him stay the night with you." Hebrew families made room on the floor, and Egyptian boys lay down beside Hebrew boys, and the doors shut, and the blood dried on the posts.

At midnight God went between them. He took the Egyptian and left the Hebrew, in the same room, on the same floor, an arm's length apart. Fathers woke to find a dead boy lying between their own sons, still warm, breathing an hour before.

Those households sang about it afterward, about rising at midnight to give thanks. They had seen the exact line where the killing stopped, and it ran through the middle of their own bedding.

The Firstborn Turned on Their Fathers

Out in the city the firstborn of Egypt were doing their own reckoning. They believed Moses. They went to their fathers and told them to let the Hebrews go, since everything the man had promised so far had landed exactly where he said it would.

Their fathers refused. "Even if every Egyptian in Egypt dies, they are not leaving here."

So the firstborn massed together and went to the palace and stood in Pharaoh's court shouting at him to send the people out before the evil came down on him as well. Pharaoh told his servants to go break their legs and drive them off the steps.

Then every one of them drew his sword and killed his own father.

Egypt was struck by means of its firstborn before it was struck in them. The sons did the first half of the work in the streets. When the fathers were down, God showed Himself and finished the sons.

Midnight and No Messenger

He came in person. One angel had been enough to turn Sodom over. On this night He sent no angel, no seraph, no messenger of any kind, and crossed the country Himself the way a king rides through his own provinces when the business is too grave to hand to anyone else.

The night was cut exactly in half, and at the cut they died. The firstborn of the Cushites and the Putites and the Ludites died. The firstborn in the dungeons died, prisoners who had cheered every decree against the Hebrews and told each other they would rather rot in chains forever than watch Israel walk out free. The firstborn of the maidservant at the millstone died. The firstborn cattle died too, so that nobody could stand in the wreckage at dawn and say the ram they bowed to had protected its own.

Two things were left standing in Egypt that morning. Pharaoh, a firstborn himself, kept alive on purpose. And Baal Tzaphon, one idol out of all of them, left where it stood so that Egypt would trust it later and follow it down to the sea.

Pharaoh at the Servants' Door

Kings get up at the third hour. Pharaoh got up in the dark. Nobody woke him and nobody carried the news in to him. He went down himself to the servants' quarters, shook his own slaves out of their beds, and went through the streets with them calling out, "Where are Moses and Aaron lodging?"

He found the door. He stood outside it and told them to get up and get out, all of them, take the flocks, take the herds, take whatever they wanted, and bless him on the way past.

Aaron did not open the door and Moses did not either. "We were told that none of us leaves his house until morning," Moses said. "Are we thieves, that we should slip out in the dark? We will go out in daylight, in front of all of Egypt."

So the king of Egypt stood in the street in the middle of the night, waiting for the sun, outside a shut door with blood drying on the posts.