A Bloody Mess
In a few days the annual celebration of Passover begins. Passover commemorates the release of the Israelite slaves by the Egyptian Pharaoh. Mind you, it took ten plagues to convince the Pharaoh that releasing the slaves was a good thing, and Passover is named after the tenth of those plagues. That’s the one where God sent down his angels to kill the firstborn son of every family in Egypt, but spared the Israelites, because, after all, they were his chosen people.
Of course, even though the Israelites were God’s chosen, the angels still had a hard time recognizing them. So the deal was, the Israelites were supposed to let the angels know where they lived by splashing their doors with the blood of a spring lamb, and the angels, seeing this blood, would “passover” the marked houses. Get it?
But what’s the deal with that? Couldn’t god just tell the angels which houses to skip? Is it like those fish symbols on cars, the Jews just needed an excuse to declare who they were? And what if the first born had already died? Or had grown up and wasn’t a child anymore? Or was still a child but had married and moved out? What if some of the Jews were busy when the message was sent around, or couldn’t get hold of a lamb in time. And why were they told to slaughter a spring lamb; I mean, it was spring, weren’t all the lambs spring lambs?
All in all I just don’t think the whole thing was very well thought out.
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