"God killed every firstborn child in Egypt"

The tenth plague of Egypt, described in Exodus 11-12, stands as one of the most morally troubling events attributed to God in the Hebrew Bible. According to the text, God personally killed every firstborn in Egypt, from the heir to the throne to the children of slaves and prisoners, as well as the firstborn of all livestock.¹ This was not collateral damage in a battle between armies. It was the deliberate, targeted killing of children and infants throughout an entire nation, carried out by God himself to compel Pharaoh to release the Israelites from slavery. The biblical text presents this without apology or mitigation:

"At midnight the LORD struck down all the firstborn in Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh, who sat on the throne, to the firstborn of the prisoner, who was in the dungeon, and the firstborn of all the livestock as well." Exodus 12:29 (NIV)¹

The biblical account

The narrative of the tenth plague is set within the broader context of the Exodus story. According to Exodus, the Israelites had been enslaved in Egypt for generations when God called Moses to demand their release.¹ When Pharaoh refused, God sent a series of ten plagues upon Egypt, each more devastating than the last, culminating in the death of the firstborn.¹

God's announcement of the final plague leaves no ambiguity about its scope or author. In Exodus 11:4-6, Moses conveys God's words:

"About midnight I will go throughout Egypt. Every firstborn son in Egypt will die, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn son of the female slave, who is at her hand mill, and all the firstborn of the cattle as well. There will be loud wailing throughout Egypt—worse than there has ever been or ever will be again." Exodus 11:4-6 (NIV)¹

The text emphasizes the totality of the destruction: no household would be spared, regardless of the inhabitants' status, guilt, or innocence.¹

The execution of the plague is described with equal directness. Exodus 12:29-30 states:

"At midnight the LORD struck down all the firstborn in Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh, who sat on the throne, to the firstborn of the prisoner, who was in the dungeon, and the firstborn of all the livestock as well. Pharaoh and all his officials and all the Egyptians got up during the night, and there was loud wailing in Egypt, for there was not a house without someone dead." Exodus 12:29-30 (NIV)¹

The phrase "there was not a house without someone dead" indicates mass casualties across the entire Egyptian population.¹

The Israelites were protected by a specific ritual. God instructed them to slaughter a lamb and spread its blood on the doorframes of their houses (Exodus 12:7).¹ When God saw the blood, he would "pass over" that house, sparing its firstborn. This is the origin of the Passover festival, which commemorates the Israelites' deliverance from Egypt.¹ The ritual requirement underscores that the default outcome was death: any household without the blood marking would suffer the loss of its firstborn, whether Egyptian or Israelite.¹

The context of the ten plagues

The death of the firstborn was the culmination of nine previous plagues that God had sent upon Egypt. According to Exodus, these plagues included turning the Nile to blood (7:14-24), infestations of frogs (8:1-15), gnats (8:16-19), and flies (8:20-32), the death of Egyptian livestock (9:1-7), boils on humans and animals (9:8-12), devastating hail (9:13-35), locusts (10:1-20), and three days of total darkness (10:21-29).¹ Each plague was presented as a demonstration of God's power and a judgment on Egypt for enslaving Israel.¹

The ten plagues of Egypt¹

The plagues themselves raise moral questions. The plague on livestock killed animals belonging to ordinary Egyptians who had no power over Pharaoh's decisions.¹ The darkness and hail disrupted the lives of common people. But the tenth plague differs in kind, not just degree. The earlier plagues targeted property, comfort, and even health, but the final plague targeted human life—specifically, the lives of children and infants who could not possibly bear responsibility for either slavery or Pharaoh's obstinacy.¹

The hardening of Pharaoh's heart

One of the most significant moral and theological problems in the Exodus narrative is the repeated statement that God hardened Pharaoh's heart. The text does not merely say that Pharaoh was stubborn or that his heart was hard; it explicitly states, multiple times, that God caused Pharaoh's refusal to let the Israelites go.¹

Before Moses even confronted Pharaoh, God declared his intention: "But I will harden his heart so that he will not let the people go" (Exodus 4:21).¹ God repeated this to Moses: "I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and though I multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, Pharaoh will not listen to you" (Exodus 7:3-4).¹ Throughout the plague narrative, the text alternates between saying that Pharaoh hardened his own heart and that God hardened it, but the divine hardening becomes increasingly dominant as the story progresses.¹

Verses attributing the hardening of Pharaoh's heart¹

The theological problem is straightforward: if God caused Pharaoh to refuse, then God created the very condition that he used to justify killing the firstborn of Egypt.² The children who died were punished for Pharaoh's stubbornness, but Pharaoh's stubbornness was, according to the text, divinely engineered. This creates a logical and moral paradox that theologians have grappled with for centuries.²

God's own stated purpose for hardening Pharaoh's heart makes the situation more troubling, not less. In Exodus 9:16, God tells Pharaoh:

"I have raised you up for this very purpose, that I might show you my power and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth." Exodus 9:16 (NIV)¹

In Exodus 10:1-2, God tells Moses:

"Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his officials so that I may perform these signs of mine among them that you may tell your children and grandchildren how I dealt harshly with the Egyptians." Exodus 10:1-2 (NIV)¹

According to the text, the plagues were not merely a means to an end (freeing the Israelites) but an end in themselves: a demonstration of divine power that required Pharaoh's continued resistance to continue.²

The scope of the victims

The text is explicit that the victims of the tenth plague included people with no conceivable connection to Pharaoh's decisions. The firstborn "of the prisoner, who was in the dungeon" died alongside the firstborn of the palace (Exodus 12:29).¹ Prisoners in Egyptian dungeons had no political power, no voice in national policy, and no ability to influence Pharaoh's treatment of the Israelites. Their children died anyway.¹

The firstborn of slaves and servants also died. Exodus 11:5 specifies that the plague would strike "the firstborn son of the female slave, who is at her hand mill."¹ These were people at the very bottom of Egyptian society, themselves subject to forced labor and exploitation. If the Israelites were oppressed in Egypt, so too were many Egyptians. Their children's deaths served no apparent moral purpose; they were simply collateral in a conflict between God and Pharaoh.²

Most significantly, the firstborn who died included infants and young children. The text makes no age distinctions. A "firstborn" could be a newborn baby, a toddler, or a child of any age. The Passover narrative centers on families losing their children, with wailing so loud that "there was not a house without someone dead" (Exodus 12:30).¹ These children had committed no sin. They had made no choices about slavery or liberation. They were killed for the sins of others—or, more precisely, for refusing to comply with a demand, when that refusal was caused by God himself.²

The killing also extended to animals. Every firstborn of the livestock died (Exodus 12:29).¹ This detail, sometimes overlooked, adds to the picture of indiscriminate destruction. The cattle and sheep of Egypt had no moral agency and could not be said to participate in Egyptian oppression. Their deaths served only to compound the suffering.¹

Common theological defenses

Theologians and apologists have offered various defenses of God's actions in the tenth plague. These arguments deserve consideration, but each faces significant problems when examined carefully.^{2, 3}

One common defense holds that the plagues, including the death of the firstborn, were judgments against the gods of Egypt.⁴ Exodus 12:12 itself makes this claim:

"On that same night I will pass through Egypt and strike down every firstborn of both people and animals, and I will bring judgment on all the gods of Egypt. I am the LORD." Exodus 12:12 (NIV)¹

The argument suggests that each plague corresponded to an Egyptian deity—the Nile turning to blood was a judgment on Hapi, the Nile god; the plague of frogs targeted Heqet, the frog goddess; and so on.⁴ The death of the firstborn, on this reading, demonstrated God's supremacy over all Egyptian religion.

The problem with this defense is that the victims were not gods but children. Whatever theological point was being made about divine hierarchy, it was made by killing human beings who had no role in Egyptian religion or in the decision to enslave Israel.² A demonstration of power that requires the death of infants is not obviously more moral than one that does not. If God wished to demonstrate his superiority over Egyptian gods, he could have done so without killing anyone—by, for example, visibly destroying Egyptian temples or idols, or by appearing in glory to the Egyptian priests.²

A second defense emphasizes that Pharaoh was warned repeatedly.⁵ Moses and Aaron appeared before Pharaoh multiple times, demanding the release of the Israelites and warning of the consequences of refusal. By the time of the tenth plague, Pharaoh had been given nine opportunities to relent. On this view, the deaths that followed were Pharaoh's fault, not God's.⁵

This defense founders on the hardening passages. Pharaoh was warned, but he was also prevented from heeding those warnings by divine intervention.² A warning given to someone who has been supernaturally blocked from responding to it is not a genuine warning. It is the appearance of fairness without the substance. Moreover, even if Pharaoh were fully culpable, the children who died were not. They received no warnings and made no choices. Collective punishment of the innocent for the crimes of the guilty violates basic principles of justice that appear elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible itself (Deuteronomy 24:16; Ezekiel 18:20).^{1, 2}

A third defense argues that the liberation of Israel required the deaths of the firstborn—that there was no other way to free the slaves from Egyptian bondage.⁵ The plagues escalated because Pharaoh's resistance escalated, and ultimately only the most devastating plague could break his will.⁵

This argument is difficult to sustain for a deity described as omnipotent. The God of Exodus parted the Red Sea, rained manna from heaven, and spoke from a burning bush.¹ Such a being is not constrained by limited options. He could have teleported the Israelites out of Egypt. He could have struck Pharaoh dead and installed a more compliant successor. He could have caused the Egyptian army to fall asleep or forget that the Israelites existed. The claim that killing children was "necessary" implies that God's power is limited in ways the text elsewhere denies.² If God had unlimited alternatives and chose the one that killed the most children, that choice requires moral justification, not appeals to necessity.²

A fourth defense holds that God, as the author of life, has the right to take life whenever and however he chooses.⁶ Because God gives life, the argument goes, he is not subject to the moral constraints that would apply to human killers. What would be murder for a human is simply God exercising his sovereign prerogative.⁶

This defense amounts to defining morality as "whatever God does." If God's actions are good by definition, then the word "good" loses its meaning: it no longer describes any particular quality but simply denotes divine approval.⁷ On this view, there is no conceivable action God could take that would be wrong, because wrongness is defined by deviation from God's will, and God cannot deviate from his own will. This makes moral praise of God empty—if God cannot do wrong, then saying God is good conveys no more information than saying God is God.⁷ The Euthyphro dilemma, articulated by Plato more than two millennia ago, remains relevant: is an action good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good?⁸ If the former, then "good" is arbitrary; if the latter, then there is a standard of goodness independent of God to which even his actions can be compared.⁸

The historical and archaeological evidence

Beyond the moral questions, there is a historical question: did the events described in Exodus actually occur? The scholarly consensus, based on decades of archaeological investigation, is that there is no evidence for the Exodus narrative as presented in the Bible.^{9, 10, 11}

Egyptian records are extensive for the relevant period (typically dated to the reign of Ramesses II in the 13th century BCE, or alternatively to earlier periods). These records include administrative documents, royal inscriptions, and diplomatic correspondence.⁹ None of them mention a mass slave population of Israelites, a series of devastating plagues, the death of all firstborn in a single night, or the sudden departure of hundreds of thousands of people.^{9, 10} The absence of any reference to such catastrophic events in contemporary Egyptian sources is difficult to explain if they actually occurred.¹⁰

The Bible describes approximately 600,000 men leaving Egypt (Exodus 12:37), which, including women and children, would imply a total population of two million or more.¹ Such a number would have represented a significant fraction of Egypt's entire population at the time.¹¹ The sudden departure of millions of slaves would have devastated the Egyptian economy and left unmistakable traces in the archaeological record. No such traces have been found.^{9, 11}

Extensive archaeological surveys of the Sinai Peninsula, where the Israelites allegedly wandered for forty years, have yielded no evidence of a mass population during the relevant period.^{10, 11} Two million people living in the Sinai for four decades would have left campsites, pottery, tools, graves, and other material remains. The desert has not produced such evidence.¹¹

Leading archaeologists, including Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, have concluded that "the saga of Israel's Exodus from Egypt is not a historical truth" but rather "a powerful and enduring cultural memory" shaped over centuries.¹⁰ William Dever, a prominent biblical archaeologist and not an opponent of biblical tradition, similarly stated that "the whole 'Exodus-Loss/Wandering' narrative must be considered as 'myth' in the technical sense" and that "there is no direct archaeological or historical evidence for the Exodus or the Sinai events."¹² These assessments represent the mainstream view in academic archaeology and ancient Near Eastern studies.^{9, 10, 11, 12}

Some scholars propose that a smaller historical event may underlie the biblical narrative—perhaps a group of Egyptian slaves who escaped and whose story was later expanded and embellished.¹⁰ But there is no evidence for even this reduced version of events, and the specific claims of the tenth plague—mass death of firstborn across an entire nation in a single night—have no archaeological support whatsoever.^{9, 10}

The moral question

If a human leader ordered the killing of every firstborn child in an enemy nation, such an act would be universally condemned as an atrocity.¹³ International humanitarian law prohibits the targeting of civilians, especially children, in armed conflicts.¹⁴ The deliberate killing of children based on their nationality or the policies of their government would constitute a war crime and a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.¹⁴

The question raised by the tenth plague is whether the identity of the killer changes the moral status of the act. If killing innocent children is wrong when humans do it, is it also wrong when God does it? Or does God operate under different moral rules—and if so, why should we call those actions "good" rather than simply "powerful"?⁷

Some theologians argue that divine actions cannot be evaluated by human moral standards.⁶ God's ways are higher than our ways, the argument goes, and what appears unjust to limited human understanding may be just from a divine perspective we cannot access.⁶ This response preserves God's goodness by making it unknowable—a goodness so different from anything we recognize as good that it includes killing children. Whether such a quality deserves to be called "goodness" is itself a question worth asking.⁷

Others argue that because the narrative is not historical, the moral question is moot.¹⁰ If no Egyptian children actually died, there is no atrocity to justify. But this response does not fully address the problem. Even as a story, the tenth plague presents a vision of God and divine justice. It tells believers that God is capable of killing children to achieve his purposes and that such actions are to be celebrated annually at Passover.² The narrative shapes moral imagination whether or not the events occurred.²

The text of Exodus does not present the tenth plague as a regrettable necessity or a tragic side effect of liberation. It presents it as the definitive demonstration of God's power and the centerpiece of Israel's founding story.¹ For thousands of years, Jews have commemorated the Passover as a celebration of God's deliverance. The seder includes a recitation of the ten plagues, with participants removing drops of wine from their cups to acknowledge the suffering of the Egyptians.¹⁵ But even this gesture of compassion occurs within a framework that treats the deaths as righteous divine judgment rather than questioning whether they should have occurred at all.¹⁵

The tenth plague remains in the biblical text, and those who take the Bible as scripture must grapple with its implications. The passage invites readers to ask what kind of being would kill children to demonstrate power, what kind of justice punishes the innocent for the choices of the guilty, and whether calling such a being "good" requires redefining the word beyond recognition.^{2, 7}