Frogs here, frogs there, frogs were jumping everywhere! (Passover pt. 1)

Get excited! Passover is coming soon!

Ya know, that holiday where Jews eat horrible, dry, bland crackers instead of bread for seven days. It's an experience.

I'm just kidding. There's a lot more details, so I've decided that today I'm going to tell the story of Passover. Nutshelled. So very brief.

Next week (when Passover is actually soon), I'm going to explain some of the good old Midrash-y details and interpretations. But right here is the bare basics.

This is a pretty well known story, so stop me if you've heard it before. Oh, wait, that's right, you can't! Oh, the joys of the internet! Mwahahahahhaa.

Ahem.

So anyways, a really long time, ago, there was this Pharaoh of Egypt. Jews were slaves there for a bit, and this Pharoh was sort of afraid they would rebel. So he decreed that all male Jew babies would be killed.

So then one woman, as it happens, gave birth to a baby boy. His name was Moses. She didn't want him to die, though, funnily enough, so she got his older sister, Miriam, to put him in a basket and drop him in the Nile river to float around for a while. As luck would have it, baby Moses was found by the Pharaoh's daughter, who was taking a bath. She thought he was so cute, she wanted to keep him forever. So she took him back to the palace. Miriam, clever girl she is, appeared and suggested that the Pharaoh's daughter get a Hebrew nurse, and so Moses's mom got to raise baby Moses.

Cut to a few years later. Moses is in his late teens, early twenties, and he sees an egyptian beating up a Sewish slave. In a fit of rage, he kills the slave, then runs away into the mountians in guilt. There, he becomes a nice shepherd and marries a shepherdess, Zephorah.

One day, Moses is wandering around, doing his shepherd thing, when he sees a bush that burns, but is not consumed. Weird. The bush talks to him, making him take off his shoes and then declaring that he is God, the God of Jacob and Isaac and all of those patriarchs. God then tells Moses to go to the Pharaoh and demand that the Jewish people be freed. Moses is confused, mostly because he's a random humble shepherd with a stutter, but God is adamant. So he takes his brother Aaron and goes to the Pharaoh's place.

When Moses says to the Pharaoh, "Let my people go!" Pharaoh almost agrees, but then his heart is hardened (I will discuss this next week). Moses does a fancy trick turnig his staff into a snake, but even that doesn't work, so God brings a plague onto Egypt.

The first plague is turning all the water into blood. This is very, very unpleasant, as you can imagine, so Pharaoh tells Moses his people can go. But then he changes his mind (because he's sooo changeable (That was a Sherlock reference. Deal with it)) and makes them all come back. Then God rolls out the next plague, which is frogs. It looked something like this:

The same deal as before. Pharaoh almost lets the Israelites go, but then his heart is hardened and he changes his mind. This process is repeated several times, with seven more plagues; lice, flies (or wild animals), disease on livestock, boils, hail, lucusts and darkness. Each time, the Pharaoh lets them go, then changes his mind because his heart is hardened. Finally, God brings one last Plague on Egypt--death of the firstborn. When Pharaoh's firstborn baby dies, he finally relents and lets the Israelites go. They flee, not even having enough time to finish leavening their bread, and run for it. They make it all the way to the Red Sea when the Pharaoh changes his mind (again!) and sends him after the Jews.

Moses (and God) have a few more tricks up their sleeves, though, and he parts the Red Sea with his staff. The Jews escape and the army drowns.

That's more or less the story of passover. I'm sorry that that was so brief, but I promise that that is because I will go into way more detail next week. There are so many interesting and different interpretations and explanations and thoughts and feelings about everything, which are so interesting. So be excited.