Day 11: Painting with Blood

There have been eight plagues in the land of Egypt since Moses turned the river Nile into blood. And now we have a bloody story again in Exodus 12, but blood figures in a bit differently. It is not shed only as a result of the plague, but first shed as a protection from the plague. The Hebrew slave families get very precise instructions from their God via Moses and Aaron. Each family must find a lamb on the tenth day of the month, keep it for four days, and then all together, at twilight, every family must slaughter the animal, collect the blood, roast the meat, and have a meal, and burn the carcass completely. This meal is the first of an annual weeklong festival which the Jewish people have celebrated every year since this night in Egypt. On that first Passover night, while the lamb was roasting, every household took a branch of a hyssop plant to use as a paintbrush and painted the doorframe red with the lamb’s blood that had been collected in a bowl. That doorframe made all the difference, changing things from “through” to “over.”

At midnight, when Moses’ God passed “through” the land, and “through” the houses and the fields of the land, death happened. Every firstborn, human and animal, was killed in the middle of the night in places that God passed “through.” But God would not pass “through” a house with blood on the doorframe, he would pass “over” it and so nobody would die in that house.

Next month, April 8-16, is Passover festival week for observant Jews, and many of them will be sure to read the story of the tenth plague, and tell their children how blood, painted on the doorframes, protected so many Hebrew people from death on a night in Egypt long, long ago.