PIANÀ DEI GRECI, DIOCESE OF
Essay offering commentary and poetic amplification of an episode that the historical source (Ex. 10:23) reports in sober essential traits.
10) The death of the firstborn (ibid. 11:1–10; 12:29–35). After the previous nine plagues, which struck the Egyptians in their goods and livestock, partly in their persons, the last and most terrible punishment was threatened by Moses and then inflicted: the death of the firstborn. On that occasion God gave the first instructions for the sacrifice of the lamb, whose blood was to mark the houses of the Israelites (ibid. 12; V. PASCHA).
On the fourteenth day of Nisan (which then, in memory of the event, marked the first month of the religious year), the destroying angel struck, during the night, all the firstborn of the Egyptians, from the son of Pharaoh to that of the lowest slave, as well as the firstborn of the animals; but it did not enter the houses of the Israelites, whose doors were marked with the blood of the lamb. Pharaoh, struck by the fate that had befallen his firstborn and by the great mourning of the land, finally granted the Israelites permission to depart with their families and all their possessions and goods.
Many of these wonders (the infestation of frogs, gnats, locusts, and other insects, as well as the phenomena of the reddened river and the thick darkness) show undoubted analogies with phenomena that commonly occur, under certain circumstances and seasons, in Lower Egypt. God, to punish the Egyptians, could have made use of the elements and perhaps of nature itself, but in such circumstances and with such severity that they became a true scourge and the finger of God was clearly seen (Ex. 8:15; Hummelauer, Vigouroux, Mallon, Vaccari, etc.). To reduce them, therefore, to mere natural events, albeit of a certain intensity but deliberately amplified by the author to present the liberation of his people from the servitude of Egypt within a framework of wonder, as many rationalists—following A. Du Boys (a well-known member of the scientific expedition to Egypt at the time of Napoleon)—would have it, is to distort the biblical account. It is obvious that in the sacred text the ten plagues are presented as real wonders, wrought by God in proof and support of Moses’ mission, and as such were recognized even by Pharaoh. But had they been mere natural events, of the kind that recur with a certain regularity or periodicity, they would have made no impression either on Pharaoh or on the Israelites, nor could Moses have appealed to them to substantiate his mission without rendering himself ridiculous (P. Heinisch [V. BIBLICA.], p. 78). The prodigious character stands out clearly from the fact that these wonders are foretold by Moses and then come to pass and cease at his word or by his prayer; they surpass, in intensity and extent, any analogous phenomenon; and while they strike a long stretch of the land, they spare the region inhabited by the Israelites.
Particularly miraculous was the tenth plague. Some exegetes, even Catholic ones, noting the analogy of the aforementioned natural phenomena, have attempted to distribute the ten plagues (whose cycle the biblical account does not provide clear chronological indications) over a span of nine or ten months, from the end of June or beginning of July to April (the first six between July and September; the next three from mid-November to mid-March; the last on the fourteenth of Nisan, toward the end of March). But these are mere conjectures; the biblical account easily suggests a more rapid succession of events.