Following on from yesterday, and I appreciate I may be taking this too far, but thinking about the details of the plague of the first born (from Exodus 11) just leaves me with lots of clarifying questions.

  • Every first born? Going how far back?
  • Does that include grown-ups too?
  • Wasn’t Pharaoh the first born (eldest son) of the last Pharaoh?
  • Does this apply to the first born of the mother, father, or both? (Assuming they can be different–especially with animals.)
  • Just “cattle” or all animals/livestock?

Classic depictions tend to show only the firstborn male son who have not reached adulthood, but that’s a specificity not in the text.

Depending on how “first born” is applied it could easily lead to the deaths of vast numbers of livestock (consider the first born of each mother that only has one calf/child per year) and potentially leaving orphans if a father was first born and the mother was not alive either.

(Imagine your mother is already dead and then one morning you wake up to find you’ve also lost your elder brother, your father, your grand-father, and most of your livestock!)

Not to belittle or dismiss the consequences of a generation of boys being lost, but the impact on the population/community/country/society could be much greater than it might first appear.