כשלחו כלה גרש יגרש, “when he does send them off, he will expel them.” The word כלה means “in toto,” i.e. including all the flocks and herds and all their moveable belongings. Not a single one of these will be left behind. This corresponds to the message of Ezekiel 39,28 concerning the redemption of the future: “I (G’d) will not leave behind a single one of you.”

וישאלו איש מאת רעהו, “let them each ask from their fellow Egyptian male, etc.” This “request” was not similar to a man or a woman asking his or her respective neighbour for some tool on the understanding that after he or she has finished using it it would be returned it to its owner. Here G’d’s instructions were to ask for the respective items as outright gifts. It was understood that G’d would make the Egyptians feel well disposed toward the Israelites so that they would willingly comply with their requests for such gifts. The last thing G’d had in mind was that the Israelites, at the very moment when their redemption was at hand, would leave behind the impression that they had fooled their neighbours and pretended that they would give back the items in question. According to Jewish law whenever a servant is released from service after he has toiled for the agreed period of time, he is entitled to receive a stake from his erstwhile master to enable him to start his economic independence. This is spelled out in Deut. 15, 13-14: “but when you send him away free, you shall not send him away empty-handed. Furnish him out of your flocks, your threshing floor, and vat, with which the Lord has blessed you.” If this law applies to treatment of a fellow Jewish servant whose wages the master has paid six years in advance, how much more so were the Jewish slaves in Egypt entitled to receive some silver trinkets in compensation for over 200 years of slavery for which no wages had ever been paid. We may find the expression רעהו both in the masculine and the feminine form as peculiar when applied to Egyptians who could hardly be described as equal to the Israelites so that this definition would apply. We have to answer that prior to the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai all human beings were treated as equal before the law. Hence the expression רע “fellow human being” was appropriate. Ever since the giving of the Torah Gentiles are not again referred to by that description. Seeing that G’d had offered the Torah to the Gentile nations and they had refused it they no longer qualified as equals. Henceforth Jews were described as brothers and companions of G’d as we know from Psalms 122,8: “for the sake of My brothers and friends, I pray for your well-being.” Our sages in Baba Kama 113 explain the phrase לכל אבדת אחיך (Deut. 22,3) as “your brother, but not a Gentile.” In other words, a Jew does not have to go out of his way to restore lost property to a Gentile seeing he is not his brother anymore. The same law applies to the prohibition of charging or paying interest to others. While the Torah forbids this inasmuch as it writes: “you must not charge interest to your brother” (Deut. 23,20), this excludes those whom the Torah does not recognize as our brothers, i.e. the Gentile.

כה אמר ה' כחצות הלילה, “thus has the Lord said: ‘around midnight,’ etc.” Actually, G’d had told Moses that the dying of the firstborn would occur precisely at midnight, as the Torah testifies that it took place בחצות הלילה, “at midnight” (12,29). Moses changed the wording to “around midnight.” Berachot 4 explains that Moses did so in order not to give the Egyptian astrologers a chance to call him a liar in the event their calculations of midnight were not precise and they thought that Moses did not know the exact time of midnight.

The obvious question which arises is that we know that for several plagues past the astrologers and magicians had not dared show their face at Pharaoh’s palace anymore after they had acknowledged that the plagues were G’d’s doing. What would cause them to accuse Moses of being imprecise if the plague did not occur at the time they considered as “midnight?” Had Moses not established his own credibility beyond any doubt during the preceding nine plagues, each one of which had occurred precisely when and how Moses had predicted? These astrologers were well aware that Moses had not done anything on his own but had only announced what G’d was about to do! Furthermore, even assuming that the astrologers would accuse Moses of having lied, would this bother him enough to edit what G’d had told him, i.e. “at midnight?”

We may have to answer that up until the third plague all the Egyptian astrologers and magicians had indeed thought that Moses had instigated the plagues on his own, not G’d. They had credited him with superior skills and knowledge. Once they had observed the third plague they had revised their attitude and admitted that “a finger” of G’d was at work. After that they had observed that the plagues had been performed by Moses himself after he had issued warnings. They had also observed that each time the cessation of the plague had occurred after Moses had prayed to G’d to cancel it. Moses’ image as a powerful prophet had increased from plague to plague. The image of the Egyptian astrologers and magicians had suffered in direct proportion to the image of Moses and G’d having increased in the minds of the Egyptians at large. Seeing this was so, Moses worried that all of this could be undone if at the last plague the Egyptian astrologers would finally be able to accuse him of an inaccuracy. If that were to occur, they would retroactively renounce their new-found belief in G’d and His power. Moses was not prepared to risk this desecration of the name of G’d.

I believe that a further consideration which compelled Moses to change the word בחצות to כחצות, was the well known fact that according to the astronomers the beginning of a day rotates in the order of the following seven planets commencing with ח'לם כצ'נש, whereas the nights commence according to the pattern כנ'צש חל'ם. [The first set of letters stands for the planets “sun, moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn. Sunday morning would be under the aegis of the sun; Monday morning under the aegis of the moon, etc., Ed.] Moses changed the word בחצות to כחצות to create the impression that the plague of dying would commence at the end of the 6th hour of the rule of Jupiter which was perceived to be the omen for life, not death. Had the plague commenced or been predicted to commence at midnight, i.e. at the time that the planet Mars came into its own, the fact that dying would occur then would have been considered far less miraculous. They would have attributed the whole disaster to natural forces.

In fact, the plague did begin at that moment as G’d does not bother to interfere with laws of nature unless there is a compelling reason. Whenever He can accomplish His purpose by utilizing the existing norms He does so. In this instance He was desirous of utilizing one of His regular servants, i.e. the planet Mars in order to kill His enemies. We find something similar in connection with the deluge. The Talmud Berachot 59 explains that in order to orchestrate the deluge G’d took two stars out of the constellation Pleidas and as a result there developed the deluge. [In other words, G’d used mechanisms existing in nature in order to produce certain hitherto unknown phenomena. Ed.] The plague of the dying of the firstborn would have remained a most powerful plague even if Moses had not changed G’d’s wording seeing that even the scoffers would not have credited Mars with the power to effect more than a few deaths at a time, especially seeing this was not the time of year the influence of this planet was at its height. The demonstration of maybe a million Egyptians dying and all of them being firstborns at that would surely have enhanced G’d’s image rather that diminished it. It would have been demonstrated beyond doubt that such an occurrence could not be credited to horoscopic influences at all. Nonetheless, all the believers in horoscopic influences are convinced that the majority of children born after a nine-month pregnancy owe their live birth to the influence of the planet Jupiter. This prompted Moses to word G’d’s warning in such a way that if the dying occurred at a time which was governed by the planet Jupiter the phenomenon would appear to contradict accepted concepts even more than if he had announced that it would take place when the planet Mars was the dominating planet in the skies. It would prove once and for all that the power over life and death was firmly rooted in G’d’s domain not in a domain which He had delegated to the planetary system. When we read in Job 34,20: “some die suddenly, in the middle of the night people are in turmoil and pass on,” the expression יגועשו used in the verse in Job is similar in meaning to Psalms 18,8 ותגעש ותרעש הארץ, “then the earth quaked and rocked.” The word ויעבורו “and pass on” in that verse in Job referred to the Israelites to whom Pharaoh had said: “rise and leave my people, etc.” The last words in that same verse in Job: “even great men are removed -not by human hands,” are a reference to the Egyptians who up until that moment had exerted fear upon the Israelites, an emotion which evaporated as if it had never existed without human force accounting for this.

According to Shemot Rabbah 18,2 the meaning of the word כחצות is that midnight would have a dual function; death as a form of retribution for the Egyptians, and justice and righteousness for the long suffering Israelites.

אני יוצא בתוך מצרים, “I will go out amongst Egypt,” Onkelos translates these words as “I will reveal Myself.” Our sages quote Micah 1,3 on this verse “G’d will leave His abode and He will come down and stride on the heights of the earth.” Talmud Yerushalmi Taanit 2,1 suggests that G’d will switch application of one of His attributes for another i.e. He will exit from one attribute and switch to another, in this instance the attribute of Justice.

ומת כל בכור, “and every firstborn will die.” The meaning is “regardless of whether he is the firstborn of the male (who provided the sperm) or if he is the firstborn of the female.” The curious wording in the Midrash Hagadol means that if one man impregnated 10 women all of whom had previously not given birth, the males born as a result are considered as “firstborn (of) the women.” If the situation is reversed, and a woman gives birth to ten males each by sperm of another male, then such “firstborn” are considered as “firstborn (of) men.” This is what Assaph means in Psalms 78,51: “He struck every firstborn in Egypt, the first fruits of their vigor in the tents of Cham.” We have another verse in Psalms 105,36 where the firstborn are also described as “the first fruit of their vigor.” It appears that the firstborn of “males” are described as ראשית לכל אונם, whereas the firstborn of women are described as ראשית אונים באהלי חם. The reason is that woman is traditionally associated with the word אהל, “tent.” Compare Judges 6,8 הם ומקניהם יעלו ואהליהם, “they and their cattle ascended together with their “tents,” i.e. with their women.

מבכור פרעה אשר יושב על כסאו עד בכור השפחה, “from the firstborn of Pharaoh who would sit on his throne to the firstborn of the maidservant, etc.” The Torah first mentioned the most aristocratic firstborn and concluded with the most lowly born firstborn who performed the menial task of rotating the millstone so that these convicts should not say that their deity had protected them against this ultimate punishment. Later on, (12,29) when the Torah reports what happened, this lowly born firstborn is described as the “firstborn of the prisoner in the dungeon.” It all amounts to the same thing. [This presumes the question that seeing these slaves could not have enslaved the Israelites, why should they now become victims. Ed.]

However, I have heard a reason given for the Torah changing the description of the people at the low end of the social scale being that male slaves used to be employed by day to rotate the millstones whereas at night they were brought back to the dungeons. Seeing that when Moses was prophesying what would happen it was daytime, he used the metaphor of the firstborn rotating the millstone. However, seeing the actual happening took place at night, the Torah switched metaphors and referred to the captive in the dungeon, the place where he died.

וכל בכור בהמה, “and the firstborn of every domestic animal.” If man sinned, what did the animals do that they too had to pay the penalty? The reason the firstborn animals had to die was because the Egyptians had made deities of them. When G’d exacts retribution from a nation, He commences by punishing their livestock first (compare Mechilta Pisscha 13). Our sages Bereshit Rabbah 96,5 explain that just as the worshipers are punished so are those being worshipped.”

לא יחרץ כלב לשונו, “not a dog will whet his tongue.” Looking at the plain meaning of the text the Torah appears to compare the plague of the dying of the firstborn to dogs. This is to teach us that at the time wicked people suffer damage the righteous are saved from suffering such damage. This concept is spelled out in Psalms 91,6 “a thousand shall fall on your left and ten thousand on your right, but it shall not reach you.”

A Kabbalistic approach: “what does the whetting of a dog’s tongue have to do with the plague of the dying of the firstborn?” It is a well known fact that the dog is a totally materialistically oriented animal which is never satiated. Isaiah 56,11 confirmed this when he said: “moreover the dogs are greedy; they never know satiety.” The greed of the destroyer (Satan) is similarly never satiated. Proverbs 30,15 describes him as הב, הב, “constantly demanding: “give! give!” Seeing that the animal which died of natural causes as well as the one which was torn by wild beasts (נבלה וטרפה) died due to the power of said “destroyer,” the Torah commanded to throw such carcasses to the dogs (compare Exodus 22,30) so that two species of the same category should meet. This is the mystical dimension of our verse here. Seeing that it is the nature of the dog to constantly attack and cause damage, it was appropriate that just as the celestial destroyer (Satan, the angel of death) did not attack the Jewish firstborn so its terrestrial counterpart would not make any threatening noises either. The tongue is characteristic of the original serpent which inflicted its damage upon the world and upon man by the indiscriminate use of its tongue. This is why the tongue of the dog is singled out by the Torah in this connection. The most concentrated power of the destroyer is emanated to it by the attribute of Justice which killed all the firstborn of Egypt. This attribute is at its most powerful at midnight. This is why the dying of the firstborn had to occur at midnight. The Torah informs you here by inference that the dogs used to bark halfway through the second משמרת, “watch” (out of a total of three) of the night. In other words, it was customary for the dogs to bark at midnight. This was the time when the angel of death would normally reap its harvest in Egypt. Baba Kama 60 states that when the dogs wail it is a sign that the angel of death has arrived at that time. On the other hand, when the dogs make happy sounds it is proof that the prophet Elijah has arrived in that town (in the absence of bitches). We have a further statement in Berachot 50 that the night watch is to be divided into three sections. During the first watch the donkey brays, a sign of the attribute of Mercy, kindness. (The donkey was never mentioned by name until the advent of Avraham who represents the attribute of loving kindness). During the second watch the dogs bark; this is an allusion to the presence of the attribute of Justice. During the third watch a wife engages in intimate talk with her husband and the infant suckles at the breast of its mother. This is an allusion that this is the time G’d arranges the livelihood for every creature at this hour. Solomon alluded to this in his famous poem אשת חיל (Proverbs 31,10-31). He wrote (verse 15) “she rose when it is still night and supplied provisions for her household and the daily fare for her maids.” The “infant” mentioned in Berachot is a reference to the universe at large, i.e. G’d’s “infant.” The “breast of its mother” is a reference to the conversation between wife and husband. Our verse here tells us that at the same hour when the dogs were barking at the Egyptians, not a single one barked at an Israelite. The Torah added: “in order that you shall know that Hashem will have differentiated between Egypt and Israel.”

צא אתה וכל העם אשר ברגלך , “leave! You and all the people that follow you.” Moses predicted that prior to his and Israel leaving the land of Egypt Pharaoh himself would have to issue the order to do so. Our verse tells us that when this point would be reached the Israelites would cease being subjects of human masters, i.e. Pharaoh, and begin to become subjects of a higher power, i.e. G’d. This is the reason why this verse is invoked to help women about to become mothers who experience difficulty in giving birth. The power of this verse is very strong. The baby struggling to exit from its mother’s womb is considered like a prisoner in a cell in need to be released from its prison in order to enter the world and study Torah. [If I understand it correctly, the whole verse is part of the name of G’d just as the whole Torah is an elongated name of G’d. By isolating this name (verse) and invoking it on behalf of the baby and its mother G’d is likely to respond to the difficulty experienced by both parties concerned. Ed.]

לא ישמע אליכם פרעה, “Pharaoh is not going to listen to you.” G’d meant that Pharaoh would not even be moved by this warning until the plague would strike him personally.

למען רבות מופתי, “in order to multiply My miracles.” This was a reference to the dying of the firstborn. The reason G’d used the plural, i.e. מופתי, was to include the splitting of the Sea of Reeds which was still to follow.

ומשה ואהרן עשו את כל המופתים האלה, “Moses and Aaron performed all these miracles.” This refers to the ten plagues which have been enumerated thus far. They have been summarized under the letters דצ'ך עד'ש באח"ב in the chronological order in which they occurred. They are actually divided into four groups consisting respectively of the four basic raw materials the earth is made of. Blood and Frogs are basically related to water. Actually, seeing that earth had been the most recently created raw material it should have been struck first. Seeing that the earth “drinks” water, G’d decided to produce first plagues which emanated from the water. When water is struck by a plague then indirectly all the four raw materials suffer. The fish in the water which really are an independent detail died as a result of their habitat being stricken. Lice and the wild beasts were manifestations of the earth being struck, the earth being “stronger” (more substantive) than the water. The Torah had reported that earth itself was ruined by the wild beasts roaming all over (8,20). Seeing that Pharaoh remained obstinate, G’d also brought upon him plagues originating in the atmosphere, plagues which attacked people’s bodies. The pestilence attacked primarily the animals, whereas the boils originating in the element fire attacked the humans. The hail and locusts originated in the atmosphere, “air.” The locusts attacked vegetation whereas darkness originated in the atmosphere. The loss of life, i.e. the loss of נשמת רוח חיים occurred as a result of the plague of מכות בכורות. When the Torah wrote that Moses and Aaron performed all these miracles, how do we reconcile this with the fact that neither Moses nor Aaron had done anything to bring about the plague of wild beasts, the plague of pestilence, or the dying of the firstborn? The word כל, both here and elsewhere does not really mean “all, each one,” but means “most.” The expression “inclining the hand” occurs in connection with seven of the ten plagues; only the three plagues just mentioned did not involve such use of either Moses’ or Aaron’s hand. Even after all the ten plagues had occurred Pharaoh was still not humbled so that G’d was obliged to continue to strengthen his heart as we know from Pharaoh’s pursuit of the Israelites (14,8).