God Murders Egyptian First Born

By James Donahue

The Jewish people still celebrate one of the most malicious Biblical-recorded killings of a nation’s children by the Hebrew God. It is an eight-day holiday called Passover, which occurs every spring at about the same time Christians are celebrating the alleged resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

To tell the Passover story in a nutshell, the Jewish people were said to have fled to Egypt to escape starvation because of severe crop failure. There the Pharaoh enslaved them for 430 years, refusing to let them leave.

Along came Moses and the ten plagues that sweep Egypt and force the Pharaoh to submit, and allow the Hebrew people to start what became a 40-year exodus across the Sinai Desert. If you remember, this was when all those people, some 600,000 families, lived on "mana" that fell from the sky every night.

This was an incredible and difficult to believe account in itself. But the Passover event, which was the tenth and final "plague," involved the killing of the first-born children in every non-Jewish family. This included even the animals, according to Exodus 12:29:

"At midnight the Lord struck down all the firstborn in Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh, who sat on the throne, to the firstborn of the prisoner, who was in the dungeon, and the firstborn of all the livestock as well."

The Jewish families had been forewarned. They were instructed to slaughter a sheep and smear its blood over the door frame of every home. When the spirit of death swept through Egypt, it would "pass over" the homes with sheep’s blood smeared on the doors.

This final assault broke the spirit of the Pharaoh. He finally agreed to allow the mass exodus of the Hebrew people, and they were set free to follow Moses into the desert for the long journey back to what they believed was "the Holy Land." It took them 40 long years to get there, but they were, at last, on their way.

Or so the Bible says.

There is a severe problem with this story. Ancient Egypt was not a democracy. The people had no say in the Pharaoh’s decision to hold the Israelites captive for so long. So what was accomplished by the killing of thousands of innocent first-born children and animals? Even people’s pets were apparently included in the slaughter.