If you kill enough babies, you can accomplish anything.
Once Yahweh finished showing off his cool plagues he finally got down to business. He had Moses have Aaron tell all the Israelites to steal (borrow without intent to return) a whole bunch of jewels, gold, and silver from their Egyptian neighbors. Once the Hebrews got their hands on all the riches they could gather/steal, they had to kill a whole bunch of baby sheep and paint the door frames of all the Hebrews. Then they had a big party and ate a whole bunch of lamb and unleavened bread.
That night Yahweh wandered around killing the firstborn of every household that didn’t have a bloody door frame. Of course I’m not sure if Yahweh couldn’t tell the difference between Hebrews and Egyptians, or He just really wanted blood all over the place, you know, for decoration and stuff. In any case, because Yahweh is a god, He was able to visit several hundred thousand households and kill all sorts of kids. He also got all the firstborn cattle.
Once the Egyptians noticed all the death, including Pharaoh’s heir, Pharaoh had Moses and Aaron pulled out of their beds and taken to his palace. He told them to take the Hebrew slaves and leave the country before all the Egyptians ended up dead. Of course this was what the Hebrews had been waiting for, so they took all the riches they looted from the Egyptians and booked it out of there. As far as I know, they are the only foreign group to ever live in Egypt for 430 years and eventually outnumber the ‘native’ population without leaving a single shred of evidence for future scholars to discover. Once you start to work with Yahweh, everything becomes miraculous.
Moral: when it comes to baby killing, sometimes you just have to take matters into your own hands: if you’re a god.
Ref: Exodus 11 - 12
Note: I would really like someone to explain to me how the Egyptians and Hebrews lived side by side for 430 years without losing any of their racial identity if they started to mingle soon after the first Hebrew arrived (Genesis 41:45). The original Hebrew population in Egypt was only seventy individuals, many of whom were already 50% Egyptian by their mothers. You think that in 430 years seventy people grew to 600,000 adult men (Exodus 12:37) and probably 900,000 women and children without any additional Egyptian contributions?
The current rate of population growth requires modern medicine and super progressive agricultural techniques. It is higher than the population growth 4,000 years ago. If we assume the 70 original super baby-hungry Hebrews managed today’s rate of global population growth, they would have numbered 7,730 individuals after 430 years if they had not mixed with the Egyptians. For them to arrive at a final exodus population of 1,400,000 ‘Hebrews’ they must have been genetically 99.5% Egyptian.
Of course the Hebrews could have done it easily if they managed to equal the highest population growth rate ever observed anywhere on the planet at a time when the annual world population growth was close to zero. I have a hard time believing they could achieve near 0% infant mortality, close to zero losses due to childhood illnesses and produce enough much food to sustain growth if they spent most of their day making bricks and didn’t have modern irrigation, farm equipment, or health care.
Good thing that with God, all things are possible.
