This week’s Torah portion completes the story specific to the plagues of Egypt, in parsha ‘Bo,’ (Exodus 10:1 through 13:16), and the basis for literally ‘the beginning of months’, and the time of Pesach.
Again, the bottom line for the signs, miracles, and plagues is “Ani YHVH!”. And this time there’s a specific instruction as a result — albeit one that the ‘whore church’ has ignored, often even lied about, for centuries.
On Erev Shabbat, as usual, Mark Call of Shabbat Shalom Mesa goes through the whole story, picking up this time with the plague of locusts, and culminating with the ‘death of the firstborn’.
Be sure to ‘stay tuned’ for the Sabbath Day teaching, and “food for thought.” Often, we tend to look for prophetic parallels, and indications from accounts like this one to attempt to establish “where we are” on a timeline. And Mark has always been a big proponent of understanding cycles, and patterns.
But the Sabbath day teaching this week definitely explores a slightly different perspective. There are certainly things in this week’s plagues that suggest parallels. We have plagues of locusts, not only literal but certainly metaphoric. And that applies even more so to the kind of “darkness which may be FELT.”
Yet there are other major differences, too. Pharoah then did NOT want to “let the people go,” while today’s pharoah-equivalents seem intent on killing masses of them instead. And there’s certainly no candidate for a Moses-like contender to confront hard-hearted tyrants now like there was then, much less a general understanding of just Who is driving the narrative.
All the more reason to look very closely into what the story is teaching us.
“Bo: Plagues and Pharoahes – Then and Now”
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