Ok, so I know this is a difficult question. How can a God of Love, turn around and kill children? What kind of love is this.
We are of course referring to the 10th plague visited upon the Egyptians by God. It seems that each plague was of a type that was intended to show the Egyptians that the God of the Hebrews was greater than any god the Egyptians might claim. Thus we have:
1.Turning the Nile to blood, Exodus 7:14-25. Isis was the Egyptian god of the Nile. Khnum was the guardian of the Nile.
2.Frogs, Exodus 8:1-5. Heget was the goddess of birth and had the head of a frog.
3.Gnats, Exodus 8:16-19. Set was the god of the desert.
4.Flies, Exodus 8:20-32. Re was the sun god. Uatchit was a god possibly represented by the fly.
5.Death of Livestock, Exodus 9:1-7. Hathor, goddess with a cow’s head. Apis was the bull god.
6.Boils, Exodus 9:8-12. Sekmet, goddess that had power over disease. Sunu, the god of pestilence.
7.Hail, Exodus 9:13-35. Nut, the goddess of the sky. Set, god of storms.
8.Locusts, Exodus 10:1-20. Osiris, god of crops.
9.Darkness, Exodus 10:21-29. Re, the sun god. Horus, a sun god. Hathor, sky goddess.
10.Death of firstborn, Exodus 11:1 - 12:30. Min, god of reproduction. Isis, goddess who protected children. Pharaoh, considered a god.1
Almost all the following information comes form
christian-thinktank.com/.2
- Approximately 69000 children were killed by the plague, or slightly less than 3% of the total population.
- 10 clear and specific demands to let the Hebrews go, followed by a practical and forewarned consequence.
- Pharaohs and the Egyptians had a comprehensive infanticide program running against the Hebrews for possibly 80 years.
- The Egyptians first tried to control Hebrew numbers through forced labour, meaning they worked them literally to death. Men, women and children.
- The Egyptians then instituted the infanticide program where all Egyptians, who were trained to hate the Hebrews, where ordered and expected to kill all male male babies of the Hebrews upon birth, by drowning.
- Approximately 2,750,000 male Hebrew babies were murdered over the 80 years of slavery.
- This infanticide and the working the slaves to death, to manage the population levels of the Hebrews was set to continue, until God’s intervention.
- Important note, there is no suggestion that either innocent deaths of the Hebrews or of the Egyptian male first-born children was a punishment to those children. There is absolutely no reason to think that Christ’s death and resurrection, which reaches throughout ALL time, did not also mean that these children were brought into heaven. In fact, there is every reason to believe that these children are now living in paradise.
- Important note two, there is a qualitative difference in the deaths. The Egyptian first-born male children seem to have died in their sleep, with no suffering. On the other hand, the Egyptians killed the Hebrew children primarily through drowning.
- The 10th plague as an absolute last resort.
- Pharaoh was warned in no uncertain terms, and given ample opportunity to avoid the tragedy, but he and his court refused to release the Hebrew’s from their tortuous and murderous slavery.
- Both the Egyptians and the Hebrews, as with most of the ancient civilisations of this time and location, operated under primitive and shared standards. “An eye for an eye”. The moral code of that time was that if it was alright for Pharaoh to kill the children of other races, then it was morally alright for other races to kill Egyptian children. That is to say, for every child the Egyptians killed, then the Hebrews and their God have the right to kill an Egyptian child. This code was such that a person of that time would never have held God responsible, but rather Pharaoh, who had begun the killing of innocents.
- God’s action was a one-time event, which stopped the continuing killing by Pharaoh; Pharaoh’s program was every day, every year, every decade…
In summary, I have to agree that God was actually extremely lenient on the Egyptians. He was able to meet the moral code of that time in such a way as to halt, once and for all, the Hebrew labour death camp and infanticide of the Hebrews. He did not take the first-born Egyptians in violence, but quickly, and in their sleep, for it happened around midnight. He tried over and over to stop this violence against the Hebrews, but to no avail. In fact, the Egyptian response was to work them even harder, which is to say, they already worked so hard they were dying, so this meant they would be dying even more often.
How do you stop them. You cannot take away their free will. It was clearly important to God that the Egyptians tell the Hebrews to go and be free. The Hebrews had also lost all faith in God. Only an act like this would allow all of this to happen.
Remember too, that the Hebrews had not even entered into the first covenant with God. They were themselves in the very early stages of coming to know God. They did not even have the Ten Commandments yet. So God was dealing with very primitive peoples on both sides and dealing with them in the ways of their time.
For me, in addition to all this, I do believe God is Love, as expressed in Christ’s Passion, Death and Resurrection. I do believe God is Just. More so than any human can ever be, or comprehend. And, although I may not understand everything in the Bible, or in life generally, that does not mean to me that God is not Just. It simply means I don’t understand yet. But I have faith that I will.
