Episode Details
Back to EpisodesExodus Chapter 12: Death of the First Born (Part 2)
Description
The tenth and final plague has arrived. At midnight, the firstborn throughout Egypt die, a great cry rises from the land, and Pharaoh finally summons Moses and Aaron and commands Israel to leave. After repeatedly refusing to release God’s firstborn, Pharaoh loses his own, and the king who once asked, “Who is the LORD?” is left asking Moses for God’s blessing as Israel prepares to walk out of Egypt.
In this episode, we wrestle with one of the most difficult judgments in Scripture and a question that is more complicated than it first appears: who actually killed Egypt’s firstborn? We examine Exodus’ mysterious “destroyer” alongside the different ways this event is remembered in Psalms, Wisdom of Solomon, Jubilees, Jewish tradition, and the larger biblical portrayal of angels carrying out divine judgment. We also explore the personification of Death and Destruction throughout Scripture and why the biblical authors seem far more comfortable with the activity of spiritual beings than many modern Christians are.
We also return to Egypt’s serpent imagery and the strange ancient symbol of the Ouroboros—the serpent consuming its own tail. From Pharaoh’s uraeus to Egypt’s ideas about death and regeneration, we explore how Pharaoh increasingly functions as a type of the biblical adversary: attacking God’s firstborn, opposing God’s rule, and ultimately destroying his own kingdom through his rebellion. That imagery carries us from the serpent of Genesis to the dragon waiting to devour the child in Revelation and ultimately to the cross, where evil’s attempt to destroy Christ becomes the very means through which it defeats itself.
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