Hebrews. The claim is that it’s not a celebration of Egyptian death, but of
Hebrew life rings hollow. YHWH lets you live every day of the year. The only
reason why this day was special was because YHWH’s Angel of Death was
busy slaughtering other people – whose only crimes were not being Hebrew
and being first born. A genocide is where you kill innocent people because of
their ethnicity or religion or some other nonsense inspiring your disdain or
hatred. The Pesah does not celebrate a miraculous survival as an act of
YHWH’s mercy, as some would contend. The Hebrews didn’t survive a
natural calamity by the intervention of YHWH (who would have caused the
calamity anyway), which you could celebrate. If the only people who
survived the Asian Tsunami of 2004, which killed over 200,000 people, were
Jews, then by all means celebrate YHWH’s preferential mercy. But in the
Exodus story, YHWH never intended to harm the Hebrews, so they were
never in the danger zone. So there is nothing special to thank YHWH for
except in terms of “passing them over” on the way to kill the Egyptians.
The slaughter is the pivotal event, it’s the one that gets the Hebrews free
and starts them on their way to their own accomplished genocides in their
tiny bit of the Promised Land as under their new leader Joshua they
exterminate the local inhabitants whose only crime was being alive where
YHWH wanted the Hebrews to live. The creator of the universe, and of all
humanity, never uses an eviction notice, but then in those days he wasn’t
the Canaanites’ god any more than he was the god over the Egyptians. He
was a petty tribal god, exuding antipathy for the parts of humanity that
wasn’t Hebrew – in short, a celestial racist. We should be pleased that YHWH
exhibits no knowledge of any cultures or peoples beyond about a thousand
or so kilometers of Jerusalem, as there is no telling what YHWH would have
tried to do to them.
In conclusion, I am not persuaded by any of the mainstream or apologist
excuses or explanations of the criminality of the 10th plague. Maybe you
are. But I am not comfortable with a celebration which has as its central
defining element the murder by a god of innocent people, without even an
excuse of some committed “sin.” The only comfort is that it’s all fiction.
There was no mass Hebrew slavery in Egypt. The Hebrews never
outnumbered the Egyptians. There were no plagues visited upon an innocent
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