This is the Baymaw podcast with Marty Solomon. I'm his co-host, Brent Billings. Today we are diving into the story of the Passover and its plagues, God's interaction with Pharaoh and the call of God's rescued people.

Yeah, so I thought maybe we might take a couple podcasts to do this, but after we looked at it, we're just going to do this in one big, quick conversation.

And part of the reason is you might have remembered me kind of lamenting before on another podcast about how a lot of Foreman's older material, Rabbi David Foreman, we've talked about him before.

A lot of his older material had been taken offline, stuff that I had learned from originally.

And now I know why over the Christmas break, I picked up a book I had of his for quite some time, but hadn't read yet. It was his most recent book.

Jim, thank you for giving me that to giving that to me as a gift. But his most recent book was titled The Exodus You Almost Past Over by Rabbi David Foreman. The Exodus You Almost Past Over.

It's a good title. It's a good title. It's just like the queen you thought you knew. He likes to do that with his titles.

But I read through it and I realized that he had just, man, done so much work since I had heard it years ago and had packaged it with even more work that he had done.

And it's just so good. And I didn't know how I would, however, take some of his new material and work it into my, my current teaching.

And so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to recommend you read the book. I'm going to summarize it. It really won't be a whole lot different than my past teaching, but I'm going to point you towards that book because his material is so, so.

So, so good. So the Exodus You Almost Past Over by Rabbi David Foreman. If you find what we're talking about today at all and treating, you're definitely in a way to get the book.

Oh, so good. And he just gets better and better with every book he writes with being able to written to write to communicate, excuse me, in written in written form. And man, this is no exception. It's probably his best work, best work yet in my opinion.

Anyway, so that's kind of one of the centerpieces that we're using for this and I have no desire to plagiarize. So I want to make that real clear up front that that's the work I'm using to kind of walk through this and I'm just kind of giving you a summary synopsis.

I'm only going to read one brief section out of the book. I'm just kind of giving you a fly by Cliff notes of the big general argument he makes in the book and then you can go find it for yourself.

But Foreman and typical Rabbi fashion, Rabbi's love to do this are going to start with a whole list of questions.

They're going to get you into the story and pull you into the narrative by asking a whole lot of questions. And so Foreman does that. He's going to ask a whole bunch of questions.

And then we're going to go about trying to answer those questions in reverse. We're going to go backwards as we try to answer these questions. But here are these questions.

First of all, the name Passover. Like of all the things you're going to name this holiday. Foreman says, why name it Passover?

And he has these brilliant stories that he uses about angels and people picking names and just to put it to a fun background. But why would we name it Passover? Why not Freedom Day? Why not Independence Day?

Isn't the whole story of Passover? Isn't it about freedom and independence? Wasn't about the liberation of the Israelites from Egypt?

Like why Passover? Why focus on one and it's a big moment. No doubt it's a big moment in the story. But it's not the point of the story. Why focus on one of the plagues?

The Passover where God saved the firstborn. And speaking of firstborn, why is firstborn so important to this whole thing?

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