That this covenant with Yahweh was kept when all about them the first-born children of the Egyptians were sacrificed, the feast of the Passover (from חטם, pesach, meaning “to pass by, to spare”) attests. Yahweh told Moses that he was to claim the lives of not only the first-born of the Egyptians “from the first-born of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the first-born of the captive that was in the dungeon,” but also the first-born of all the animals in the land. That the chosen people might not suffer in this contemplated destruction they were instructed, through Moses, to take the blood of a lamb, “a male of the first year,” and “strike it on the two side-posts and on the upper door-post of the houses,” that it might be known wherein the faithful dwelt.
A NOTABLE CASE OF ABANDONMENT—THE FINDING OF MOSES
(AFTER PAINTING BY SCHOPIN)
Here we see the beginning of the threshold sacrifice or covenant, which became, in time, the foundation sacrifice.
So complete was this claiming of the first-born that “there was not a house where there was not one dead.”[237]
From their deliverance from this visitation, Yahweh instructed Moses to “sanctify unto me all the first-born, whatsoever openeth the womb among the children of Israel; both of man and beast, it is mine.” Already there was the example of the patriarch Abraham that an animal might be substituted; now there was the statement from the One on high that the first-born of the chosen people might be redeemed. Of the temper of the people at this time and their proneness to fall into the vices of their neighbours, and of idolatry, we need only the statement of Joshua[238] that while in Egypt—Renan says that they were not there more than three hundred years—they acquired the habit of worshipping false gods.
The speedy fall from grace, as shown by the worship of the golden calf while Moses was away from them for a short time, is another evidence of their excitability, although modern scientists have declared that under adverse circumstances the entire civilized peoples would revert to barbarity in three generations.
The struggle upward out of barbarism could have been attended with nothing less than herculean belief on the part of the leaders of Israel, when we see this lapse came after their miraculous escape from Egypt and after the receipt of the ten commandments. Illuminating too is the fact that the making of the golden calf was superintended by no less a person than Aaron, the brother of Moses, his confidant and first lieutenant.
When we come to the period of the Judges, we find the Israelites falling away from their humanitarianism. While Joshua and his contemporaries were alive, they held to their religion, but the gods of Canaan, together with the more easily understood and more deeply ingrained rites of idolatry, reappeared as soon as the patriarchs had passed away.
Nothing indeed is more interesting in this study of the Old Testament than the record of the difficulty that the leaders and prophets had in keeping a semi-barbarous people up to their standard of civilization and humanization. Ethnological and archæological data picture the struggle forward but feebly, when compared to the written records of the Israelites, especially during the period of the Judges.