The tenth and final plague - the death of Egypt's firstborn - is the climax of the Exodus plagues narrative and the event that motivates Pharaoh to release Israel from slavery. Exodus 12:29-30 describes the scope of the judgment in terms designed to be comprehensive: from the firstborn of Pharaoh sitting on his throne to the firstborn of the captive in the dungeon, from human to animal, throughout Egypt. The simultaneous nature of the deaths - at midnight, at a single divine stroke - distinguishes this plague from the others and gives it the character of a final judgment.
The theological logic of the tenth plague is inseparable from the Passover institution that accompanies it. God instructs Moses that Israelite households are to slaughter a lamb without blemish, mark their doorposts with its blood, and eat the meal in readiness to depart (Exodus 12:1-14). The blood on the doorposts is the sign by which the destroyer passes over the Israelite households. The equation is explicit: the lamb's blood is the substitutionary protection that separates the households of the spared from the households of the judged.
Doré's engraving focuses entirely on Egyptian grief. The dark winged figure of the destroying angel moves across moonlit Egyptian rooftops with terrible purpose, and in the streets and houses below, families discover their dead firstborn sons in scenes of anguished lamentation. The Israelite households marked with blood are absent from the composition - their safety is implied by their invisibility. This visual choice embodies the theological logic: the scene is not about Israelite deliverance but about the cost of Pharaoh's repeated refusal to release God's people.
The Christian typological reading of the Passover lamb became one of the most important interpretive frameworks in the New Testament. John the Baptist's identification of Jesus as 'the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world' (John 1:29) invokes this typology directly. Paul's statement in 1 Corinthians 5:7 - 'Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed' - makes the identification explicit. Revelation's central image of 'the Lamb that was slain' (5:12) extends it into eschatological vision. The blood on the doorposts, protecting the household from the judgment that falls on those without it, prefigures the blood of Christ that the New Testament presents as the ultimate substitutionary protection.
For Victorian Protestant theology, the Passover lamb typology was central to the doctrine of atonement, and Doré's engraving of the death of the firstborn contributed to the visual culture within which that typology was taught and understood. The domestic scenes of Egyptian grief - families discovering dead sons in the night - provided a humanizing counter-weight to the abstract language of atonement theology, making the cost of the divine judgment visually immediate and emotionally comprehensible.
The Passover Seder has remained the living liturgical context in which this narrative is annually rehearsed in Jewish tradition, and the question 'Why is this night different from all other nights?' opens the re-narration of the Exodus events that constitutes the Seder's theological work. Doré's engraving entered a visual culture already shaped by centuries of Christian depiction of the plagues, and its wide circulation meant that the death of Egypt's firstborn - one of the morally most difficult passages in the Hebrew Bible - was visually present for Victorian readers in a way that could not be avoided.