By Eli Henderson

Bo has to do with when the Jews were being enslaved by Pharaoh. God tells Moses that he will no longer stand for this and tells Moses to warn the Pharaoh that if he doesn’t (famous line) LET HIS PEOPLE GO, then he will face consequences. Of course it’s not that easy and Pharaoh doesn’t let the Jews go, so God first sends down a plague of blood to replace all the water in the Nile. Pharaoh says alright - Jews can leave, but quickly changes his mind and makes them stay. God and Pharaoh do this back and forth 10 times before the death of his own first born son finally convinces him to let the Jews leave. This is probably one the best known stories in Jewish history and most Jews understand what happened. When I read this for the first time, I understood what happened but had absolutely no answer for why these horrible things HAD to happen. I was left asking WHY to everything! Why did Pharaoh not let the Jews go? Why did it take 10 plagues to convince Pharaoh? Why did God harden Pharaoh’s heart? Why did God kill innocent children? None of this made sense to me, but I started with Pharaoh.

Pharaoh shows some of the most interesting character development that I see in the big old book. He and Moses are friends at the beginning, even considering the other to be his brother. Surely that would have made Pharaoh trust Moses, even when he comes back as his enemy, or make Pharaoh feel like the Jews weren’t as foreign to him as he first thought, after finding out that the person he considered to be his brother is a Jew. But this doesn’t seem to help at all. Pharaoh still will not let the Jews go. Even when God turns the river into blood he still won’t do anything. This is HUGE! The entire river turns to blood and pharaoh won’t let them go? The Nile is big to say the least; that’s miles and miles of blood just floating around that somehow Pharaoh is able to rationalize as somewhat ok. I sort of understand why pharaoh wouldn’t change his mind here. Zoom out. If we look at this objectively, Pharaoh is in a shitty spot no matter what happens.

On the one hand, Pharaoh loses all of his work force, and on the other hand, horrible magic stuff is happening to Pharaoh. I’m not defending slavery, but this was a perfectly normal structure that had been in place for hundreds of years. To Pharaoh, this wasn’t ‘let the Jews go or a lot of people will die’ this was ‘this system (slavery) that has benefited them for hundreds of years suddenly not existing anymore.’ Normal Egyptians Doing hard labor? Being paid? Jews as equal people? Worker’s rights? These were all brand new ideas to all people at the time. For Pharaoh to take away slavery, it would have caused a huge backlash from the Egyptian community who mainly benefited from the Jews being slaves.

Okay, so Pharaoh isn’t the victim. Pharaoh is definitely a bad guy for not letting the Jews go after Moses asked nicely at first and then all those times after when God sent down plagues. Did Pharaoh not believe that God could do whatever He wanted? If God can fill a river with blood and make all types of things rain from the sky, you should probably assume that He can do anything. But should He? Should God kill innocent people to get His point across? It’s definitely classic God to threaten to kill someone (TB to Isaac, am I right?), but killing the Pharaoh's son? Not just his but all people who didn’t put sheep’s blood on their door post. In all of God’s wisdom and power, did He truly have no other choice than to slaughter innocent people? This raises difficult questions of God’s usual role as a just, moral figure. One would like to believe that God sees all of His children as equal, Jewish or not. There are also Jews out there who have justified this as God seeing the children as inherently bad people and therefore had reason to strike them. I think that there are bad and good people in this world, but I think grouping together races of people and

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