“Redeem with the lamb every firstborn donkey.”
This command comes through Moses at a time when a newly liberated Semitic peoples are fleeing from the Egyptian cosmology they’d been raised within for generations. The people, led by Moses, must re-establish a theology.
I have read scholarship convincing enough to believe Moses’s murder of an Egyptian and the plunder of Egypt as retribution for enslavement, is an oral tradition written during the Babylonian captivity. It skews an alternate possibility, one which is more historically probable: the Hyskos Kings ended Egyptian rites of king-making through the murder of three endowed with its secret. They had to flee; they’d stolen the lynchpin holding together the heavens and a civilization modeled as a mirror of those heavens.
Hyskos scribes could not cast off responsibility of tilting imbalance within the only cosmology they’d known, a terrifying guilt for any people to accept. Exodus, in its pre-captivity oral tradition, is a ray of hope, a theological bulkhead shoring up cultural guilt for imbalance within the cosmological framework.
The Lamb is their delicacy, the tender tasty meat at a time when starvation is a very plausible possibility. Firstborn beings were seen as blessed, that by which lineages and inheritance would be passed onward.
Moses’ Israelites needed mobility out of Egypt for themselves and their. The donkeys of which Moses speaks multiply these basic needs for his peoples. The blood of the lamb is to be exchanged for faith in strength and longevity.
In Christ’s example, the blood of the Lamb is sacrificed for strength and longevity of a non-zero sum message: “Love one another as I have loved you…” “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” Lenten preparation for Pascha echoes the post-Passover message to the Israelites: Let’s have faith in the communication of our message through the sacrifice of delicacies we most desire.
