Exodus 11:4

Moses speaks these words at the end of a long contest. Plague after plague has struck Egypt, each heavier than the last, from the water turned to blood in Exodus 7 to the darkness of Exodus 10, and after each one Pharaoh has hardened his heart. In the darkness Pharaoh ordered Moses away and warned him that on the day he saw his face again he would die, and Moses answered, “I will see thy face again no more” (Exodus 10:28–29). The LORD had told Moses that one more plague would come, and that after it Pharaoh would drive Israel out altogether (Exodus 11:1). So Moses, standing before a king who has just threatened his life, delivers the LORD’s final word, and the Passover follows at once in Exodus 12.

“Thus saith the LORD” is the prophet’s formula for a message that comes from God himself. The threat Moses carries is the LORD’s own decree, spoken with his authority, and Moses delivers it faithfully and with courage. The name behind “the LORD” is Yᵉhôvâh, God’s own covenant name, which comes from the verb “to be” and speaks of the self-existent, eternal God. He is the God who told Abraham that his descendants would be afflicted in a strange land, that he would judge the nation they served, and that afterward they would come out with great substance (Genesis 15:13–14). On this night he keeps that word.

“About midnight” joins châtsôwth, the middle, with layil, night, the ordinary word for night, which elsewhere can picture a time of adversity. The LORD names the hour of his judgment before it comes. “Into the midst of Egypt” takes in the whole land, from the palace to the poorest house, and all of it lies within his reach.

The tenth plague is the death of every firstborn in Egypt. The Hebrew bᵉkôwr, firstborn, carried the rank and inheritance of a family, and the firstborn son stood for its future and the continuing of its line, in Israel and in Egypt alike. “Firstborn” stands four times in this verse, and each time the circle of the judgment widens. The verb mûwth means to die, and causatively to kill. Here it is the plain “shall die”, a decree stated as certain.

The verse names the two ends of Egyptian society to take in everyone between them. At one end is “the firstborn of Pharaoh that sitteth upon his throne”. The word kiççêʼ means a seat or throne, and Pharaoh’s firstborn was the heir who would one day sit on it, so the blow falls on the future of the royal house. At the other end is “the maidservant that is behind the mill”, the woman who ground grain by hand, among the hardest and humblest work in the land. From the royal household to the servants’ quarters, every family will lose a child. The judgment reaches even “all the firstborn of beasts”, the animals on which Egypt’s wealth depended and some of which it revered as gods or used in its rites.

This was a judgment on Egypt’s religion as well as its people. Pharaoh was honoured as a divine king, often called the son of the sun god Ra, and held to embody the order of the land, which Egypt called Ma’at. Egypt looked to gods such as Osiris, Ra, Min and Heket for life, fertility and protection. Earlier plagues had struck the Nile, which Egypt honoured as the god Hapi, and blotted out the sun, which it worshipped as Ra. In one night the LORD showed himself the master of life and death in every house of Egypt, as he said, against all its gods. A psalm praises him for this kind of power: “He shall cut off the spirit of princes: he is terrible to the kings of the earth” (Psalm 76:12).

The death of the firstborn will bring a sound heard in every corner of Egypt. The word for cry, tsaʻăqâh, means a shriek or cry, a loud outcry of anguish and distress, like the cry that went up from Ekron when the hand of God was heavy on the Philistines (1 Samuel 5:10). The adjective gâdôwl, great, describes size, age, status or intensity, and here it speaks of the volume and reach of the wailing, which will grip every rank of Egyptian society. The sound stands for the loss behind it, a whole nation in mourning.

The LORD’s word came true exactly. On that night “there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead” (Exodus 12:30). Exodus had begun with a different cry. God told Moses that he had seen the affliction of his people and heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters (Exodus 3:7), and the God who heard Israel’s cry now brings their oppressors to cry out.

“Such as there was none like it, nor shall be like it any more” sets this sorrow above every sorrow in Egypt’s past and future. “Any more” translates yâçaph, to add or to continue doing a thing, and joined with lôʼ, “not”, it says that this grief would stand alone in Egypt’s history.

Against the wailing of Egypt, Israel will lie in perfect quiet. A dog barks at anything that disturbs the night, yet among the children of Israel “shall not a dog move his tongue, against man or beast.” The saying pictures a night so peaceful that even the dogs lie silent, with the smallest alarm held back. The verb behind “move” is chârats, which means to cut, sharpen, decide or decree, and with a dog’s tongue the KJV gives it as “move”. The protection covers Israel’s people and their animals alike, while in Egypt the firstborn of beasts die with the firstborn of men.

The purpose follows: “that ye may know how that the LORD doth put a difference between the Egyptians and Israel.” To put a difference, pâlâh, is to distinguish, to set apart, to make distinct in a marvellous way. The difference is God’s own act, made plain for all to see. He had already made such a difference when he kept the swarms of flies out of Goshen, where Israel lived (Exodus 8:22–23), and when the cattle of Egypt died and the cattle of Israel lived (Exodus 9:4–6). On this night the difference lies between houses of mourning and houses at peace.

God makes this difference out of his own faithfulness. Israel was enslaved and powerless, and he set them apart because of his covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to whom he had promised, “I will make of thee a great nation” (Genesis 12:2). To know, yâdaʻ, means to know by seeing and experience, to recognize and acknowledge. Egypt would know the LORD by his judgment and Israel by his protection. He had said to Pharaoh, “And in very deed for this cause have I raised thee up, for to shew in thee my power; and that my name may be declared throughout all the earth” (Exodus 9:16).

Scripture speaks of this distinction again. Malachi foretells a day when God’s people will “discern between the righteous and the wicked, between him that serveth God and him that serveth him not” (Malachi 3:18), and the psalmist says of the one who trusts the LORD, “A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee” (Psalm 91:7–10).

Moses ends with a picture of Pharaoh’s court turned upside down. “All these thy servants” are Pharaoh’s officials and courtiers. The word ʻebed means a servant or bondman, and these men of rank who serve the king will come down to Moses and bow before him. To bow, shâchâh, is to prostrate oneself in reverence, submission or worship, the honour subjects gave a king or worshippers their god. The servants of a king Egypt counted as a god would lie on the ground before a shepherd who spoke for a people of slaves, and they would beg him, “Get thee out, and all the people that follow thee.” The release Pharaoh had refused, his own court would plead for. A proverb puts the truth behind it: “The king’s heart is in the hand of the LORD, as the rivers of water: he turneth it whithersoever he will” (Proverbs 21:1).

“And after that I will go out” shows that Moses will leave on God’s terms, once the LORD’s word has come to pass. Israel’s departure will be an exodus ordered by God at his appointed time, and Moses will walk out when that time comes.

The account that follows bears this out. The Passover is given and the night of judgment comes (Exodus 12:1–30), and then Pharaoh calls for Moses and Aaron by night and tells them to go (Exodus 12:31), while the Egyptians press the people to leave in haste (Exodus 12:33). People ask whether Pharaoh’s servants really bowed before Moses. The heart of the prophecy came true in that night of desperate pleading, when the court of Egypt humbled itself and begged Israel to be gone, though the account does not describe a prostration in so many words. Psalm 105 tells the story again, from the day Israel came into Egypt (Psalm 105:23), as one of the mighty acts by which God delivered his people.

The night Moses announces is also the night of the Passover. The judgment would pass over every house marked with the blood of a lamb on its doorposts (Exodus 12:7), as the LORD said, “when I see the blood, I will pass over you” (Exodus 12:13). That lamb points to Jesus, whom John the Baptist called “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), and Paul writes, “For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us” (1 Corinthians 5:7). As the lamb’s blood shielded Israel from death that night, Christ’s blood shelters all who believe from the judgment of God.

The firstborn of Egypt died under judgment. Jesus is “the firstborn of every creature” (Colossians 1:15) and “the firstborn from the dead” (Colossians 1:18), and in a great reversal of this night, the death of God’s Firstborn brings life to all who believe. He bore the judgment due to us and cried on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46), so that we might be spared. “For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18), and through him we become heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ (Romans 8:17).

As God put a difference between Egypt and Israel, Christ makes the final difference between those who are in him and those outside him. “He that believeth on him is not condemned” (John 3:18), and “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). In Christ the people God sets apart for himself include all who believe, Jew and Gentile together, a chosen generation and a people of his own (1 Peter 2:9–10).

Moses, the deliverer standing before Pharaoh, points to Jesus, the greater deliverer. Luke calls the death Jesus would accomplish at Jerusalem his “decease”, and the word he uses is exodus (Luke 9:31). By it God “hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son” (Colossians 1:13), a freedom from the bondage of sin and death. Jesus too burned with anger at sin, as when he drove the buyers and sellers out of the temple (Matthew 21:12). And the officials of Egypt bowing before Moses foreshadow every power bowing before Christ, whom God has highly exalted and given a name which is above every name (Philippians 2:9).

In these verses God speaks before he acts. He names the hour, the reach and the cost of his judgment, and every word of it comes to pass. He was patient through plague after plague, and when the time came his justice fell where Pharaoh had been cruellest, on the sons of a land that had cast Israel’s sons into the river. He heard the cry of his people and answered it, and he remembered what he had promised Abraham long before.

The same night shows his care. In a land full of wailing, the houses of his people lay so still that even the dogs were silent, because the LORD himself had put a difference between them. That difference came by the blood of a lamb, and it comes to us by the blood of Christ, the Lamb of God, who bore the judgment so that all who trust him are spared. The God who kept his word to Israel at midnight keeps his word to his people still, and they rest in it while the world trembles.