Torah Posting: בא
The splitting of the plagues into two parshiyot has the interesting effect on me of making the second set seem more like the inevitable playing out of a didactic example than a drama with any real tension. But that’s a pretty common situation in this text because God forecasts everything to the prophetic ancestors who are the ostensible main characters.
As always in those cases, the tension comes from the characters (including God) processing the events, which they tend to do very explicitly, in monologue or dialogue, and that often seems to me to be the real wisdom payload of the Torah.
The dramas and horrors of history are a given; they’re cycles that repeat themselves; we know how they go. What we learn from this text is how generations of our ancestors in their particular situations responded to them, what their dispositions towards them were, and what effect that had on the responses and dispositions of our ancestral God and our inextricable trans-generational relationship.
The second parashah of the plagues begins with God explaining the rationale behind all this to Mosheh more explicitly than before. God explains that Mosheh must keep up the “let my people go” shtick even though God has hardened Pharaoh’s heart towards it. It’s not even for the Egyptians anymore; it’s so that the children of Yisra’el will tell this story of God’s overwhelming power over a once-impressive human empire forever, generation after generation. (So far, it’s working.)
Dutifully, Mosheh and Aharon go before Pharaoh again and threaten a plague of locusts, turning and leaving without even waiting for Pharaoh to say anything.
Pharaoh’s courtiers are beside themselves at this point. They demand he let a contingent of Hebrews go worship יהוה in the wilderness, for Mitzrayim has essentially been destroyed by Pharaoh’s intransigence.
Pharaoh summons the brothers back and releases them to go, but he insists they tell him specifically who will be in the delegation. Mosheh replies that all of his people regardless of station and gender will go. Pharaoh will not go that far, making plain his suspicion that they are plotting something bad. Pharaoh says only the men may go, and he dismisses Mosheh and Aharon from his presence.
So, lo and behold, here come the locusts. God tells Mosheh to hold his rod out over the land, and the east wind brings locusts to devour what little vegetation remains after the flaming hail from last time. The swarm is unprecedented. Nothing is left.
Pharaoh summons them back urgently and asks Mosheh to forgive him and to pray to remove the locusts, which he does, and the west wind obliges.
Once again, God hardens Pharaoh’s heart.
The next plague is three days of total, abject darkness throughout the land. This one only gets a few sentences.
This time Pharaoh allows all the people to go, but they have to leave the flocks and herds behind. Mosheh responds incredulously; not only must the Hebrews be allowed to bring their flocks, the Egyptians must provide the animals they will offer up to God when they go out to the wilderness for the festival.
Pharaoh dismisses Mosheh angrily for what sounds like the final time, “for on the day you see my face again, you will die!”
Mosheh replies, “Quite right, my good man.”
The final plague — not even the execution of it, just the preparation for it — gets its own short chapter, which is interesting. The chapter divisions are not intrinsic to the text, nor are the parashah divisions. They are both imposed later, but by different people at different times for different reasons. I’ve always found the interplay between parshiyot and chapters interesting for that reason; which beats in the story happen where, and what does it mean?
God tells Mosheh about the final plague, and God matter-of-factly states that Pharaoh will let the people go after this one. In fact, he will drive the Hebrews out once and for all. Therefore, this time, departure preparations will be necessary. God tells Mosheh to instruct the people to borrow precious objects, gold and silver, from their neighbors. Just as God controlled Pharaoh’s emotions to harden him against the children of Yisra’el, God here disposes the Egyptian people favorably towards them, due also in part to Mosheh’s great esteem.
How can this be? This part was always even harder for me to swallow than the nonconsenual heart-hardening used on Pharaoh to drag this story out. Why would the Egyptians hold the Hebrews in such esteem — after the Israelite God has absolutely devastated their lives over and over again — that they would give away their wealth to them? Maybe we’re meant to believe that it was widely understood that all this was Pharaoh’s fault (even though that was secretly God’s fault)? I don’t know. I have no satisfying response to that from this point in the story, and what I do in that situation is read on.
Now that the Egyptians are nice and favorable to the Hebrews, Mosheh lays out the final plague to Pharaoh: God is going to kill all the first-born male Egyptians, from the son of Pharaoh to the sons of slaves to the sons of cattle. And there will be a horrible cry throughout the land, and yet not even a dog shall snarl at the children of Yisra’el for it.
Everybody knows what’s going to happen at this point. It’s almost the most remarkable part of it that the Egyptians will not hold this — or any of the plagues — against the Israelites afterward, and Mosheh tells Pharaoh this in stark terms. It almost seems like the real plague for Pharaoh is political; he will lose all power over his empire, and the people will favor the Hebrew outsiders instead.
That’s the end of chapter 11. Chapter 12 takes a turn that evokes the editorial splicing I got into last week: We cut from the action to meticulous religious instructions for posterity, a kind that feels new and bracing now but will soon become a dominant genre for the rest of the Torah and possibly get a little exhausting. But this is also the most powerful stuff to me in some ways. It’s the magical instruction manual component of the Torah, the part that teaches the Jewish people our ancestral spirit work. And here it begins with the beginning of the Jewish lunisolar calendar and the festival of Pesah, the Spring Festival. Aries season. Let’s go.
On the 10th day of the month of spring in this first year of the new calendrical life of the people, each family shall select a yearling male lamb without blemish from either the sheep or the goats. Each household will offer one, but if a household is too small to do so, it may share one with a neighbor. Each household will contribute to cover the cost in proportion to what it will eat.
The lamb will be marked on the 10th and then watched until the 14th, the Full Moon. Then, at twilight, the whole congregation shall assemble and slaughter their offerings.
Then they shall take some of the blood and put it on the doorposts and the lintel of their homes, where they will eat it. They shall roast it over the fire and eat it with unleavened bread and bitter herbs that very night. Any leftovers must be burned by morning. For there will be no time to eat it for brunch; the people must eat the Pesah offering that night with their loins girded, their sandals on, and their staves in hand.
This first Pesah (Passover) night, God will go through the land of Mitzrayim and strike down all the firstborn. But when the angel of death sees the blood on the doorposts of the children of Yisra’el, it will pass over their homes.
In recognition of this act, this night, the 14th night of the month of spring, shall be celebrated as a festival for all time. For the seven days to follow, the people will eat only unleavened bread. In fact, on the first day of the festival, they must remove all leaven from their homes, and anyone who eats any hametz during the festival, their life-force shall be cut off from the people.
The first and the seventh days of Pesah will be observed as holy; no work shall be done except to prepare the meals. The unleavened bread is also clearly indicated as a core symbol of this festival; the duration of the prohibition against hametz from the evening of the 14th to the evening of the 21st is explicitly restated, as is the punishment of being cut out of the community for violating it.
Then we return to the narrative. Mosheh summons the elders and sends them out to the families to begin these observances. He adds the specific instruction that אזוב (hyssop) shall be used to spread the lamb’s blood on the doorposts. He also names המשחית, the name of the being who will execute this order for God. The best translation of this name is probably “the Slaughterer,” but I am unable to refrain from observing that it bears a similarity to the word משיח, “messiah.”
Mosheh then himself emphasizes that we’re not just doing this once; this is the institution of an eternal festival observance for our people. When the people go free from Mitzrayim, the Narrows, and enter the land promised to them by God, they will keep observing this festival. And their children will ask them what it means, and the elders will explain it to them. (Again, so far, this instruction continues to work.)
The children of Yisra’el do as God commanded Mosheh and Aharon to instruct them, and in the middle of the night, God strikes down all the first born in Mitzrayim. The cry goes out so loudly that it wakes Pharaoh and his courtiers — along with everyone else — for every single Egyptian home had a member who was now dead.
Pharaoh summons Mosheh and Aharon then and there and orders them to depart, asking them to pray to bless him also, a line which almost sounds sarcastic. The Egyptian people also urge the Israelites to leave, but here — unlike above — it’s described as impatient, wanting the Hebrews out lest all the Egyptians end up dead.
The children of Yisra’el take their dough before it is leavened, wrapping their cloaks around their kneading bowls and strapping them onto their shoulders. They also gathered up all the treasure they had ✌️“borrowed”✌️ from the Egyptians, who — the text now reminds us — were non-consensually disposed favorably to the Hebrews by God. And they leave. Here the text gives us numbers for the first time since the 70 who came to Mitzrayim in the first place, whose names we knew. There are now 600,000 Israelite men of fighting age and however many noncombatants, women, children, and elders that implies.
The text also takes care to mention that an ערב רב — a mixed multitude of other people wanting to leave Mitzrayim — go with them. This is the beginning of some critical attitudes toward diversity that will continue arising as the children of Yisra’el become a nation.
Here, in kind of an awkward place, the editorial information is stuck in that the reason the dough is not allowed to rise is that they were rushing to get out of town. It’s nice to have a reason, but one thing we will learn is, when God says to do something weird, it does not always come with a reason, and that doesn’t change anything.
Now the length of time the children of Yisra’el lived in Mitzrayim is given as 430 years, and the text says that Pesah, the day of their departure, is the end of the 430th year to the very day. ליל שמרים, it is called in Shemot 12:42. “A night of vigil” throughout the generations.
Another parenthetical on the dietary laws of Pesah is inserted: No foreigner shall eat of the Pesah offering, but a slave — (naturally, the children of Yisra’el will own slaves, let’s not get ahead of ourselves) — who is rightfully owned by an Israelite household may eat of it (once he has been circumcised). No hired laborer shall eat of it, though. It must all be eaten within the home; the meat shall not be taken out. The bones may not be broken. If a stranger who dwells amongst the people — that is, an immigrant — would offer the pesah (and all his men are circumcised, of course), he may do so. He is now a citizen. And now comes a critical passage:
תּוֹרָ֣ה אַחַ֔ת יִהְיֶ֖ה לָֽאֶזְרָ֑ח וְלַגֵּ֖ר הַגָּ֥ר בְּתוֹכְכֶֽם׃
“One Torah there will be for the citizen and for the stranger who dwells among you.”
Torah means “teaching,” but clearly in a way it means all of this, and thus it carries a connotation of “law.” What this formulation makes clear, here at the very beginning of the peoplehood of the children of Yisra’el, is that God’s Torah is inherent upon particular people, but The People is constituted not simply by ancestry but by land and by relationship. What this establishes is the Jewish attitude toward conversion, which is emphatically not some kind of creed-based or consciousness-oriented thing but more of an immigration process. You join the People, you follow the Law. And the text is being stern with the people here: The stranger who dwells amongst us is part of our people now.
With that established, the people of Yisra’el are now free. But God continues explicating to Mosheh what is happening here. Every firstborn, human and animal, must be consecrated to God. This is seemingly part of the remembrance of the last plague. This day must be remembered forever, God reminds Mosheh. One more no-leavened-bread reminder. One more reminder that this is the observance of the month of spring. And one forward-looking statement that when God brings the children of Yisra’el into the land of [insert usual list of indigenous peoples who were there first], which God promised to the Israelites’ forefathers, they shall still observe this festival there and explain to their children why they are doing so.
Once they are in the land, the consecration of the firstborn will be elaborated. The firstlings of the cattle are for God. The firstlings of the asses can be redeemed with a sheep, but otherwise their necks must be broken. And lastly, the firstborn male children must be redeemed, meaning something must be given to God in their stead. And when the children ask why, remind them of the whole story of the last plague. And that shall be a “sign upon your hand and a symbol between your eyes” that God freed us from Mitzrayim. (This becomes a prooftext for the practice of tefillin.)
What we have here in Parashat Bo is nothing less than the birth of the Jewish people. It’s as literal as it can possibly be; we are conceived in Mitzrayim, the “narrow place” where a life-giving river runs. God nurtures us within our cozy homes while cold death rages outside. Then we pass through the bloody doorposts and out towards the sea, and God begins to give us our first instructions for how to live as a people amidst a mixed multitude.
🤰
