What Does Exodus 11:6 Mean?

"There shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there has never been, nor ever will be again." The great cry (Hebrew: tzeakah gedolah, literally great outcry) of the Passover night is the inverse of the cry that initiated the entire Exodus: the "groaning" and "outcry" of Israel's slavery that YHWH heard in Exodus 2:23-24.

Hebrew history has a conceptual framework of cries that ascend to heaven and require divine response: the blood of Abel cried from the ground (Genesis 4:10); the cry of Sodom was great (Genesis 18:20-21); Israel's groaning reached God (Exodus 2:23). The Passover cry is the definitive reversal: the cry that went up from Israel's slavery is answered by the cry that goes up from Egypt's judgment.

The "such as there has never been, nor ever will be again" formula appears for the third time in the third triad (unprecedented hail, unprecedented locusts, unprecedented darkness: and now an unprecedented national cry). The Passover night's cry exceeds even the Locust and darkness plagues' unprecedented intensity: it exceeds all previous and all future cries in Egypt's history. The midnight cry is the climactic sound of the Exodus: the moment when Egypt registers in its full collective grief the cost of a generation's resistance to YHWH's demand.

The great cry of Egypt's Passover night echoes into the New Testament's birth narrative: Matthew 2:18 quotes Jeremiah 31:15's "Rachel weeping for her children" in the context of Herod's slaughter of the innocents at Bethlehem. The typological connection between Egypt's firstborn and Bethlehem's infant males runs through Matthew's narrative: where Egypt's firstborn died at the first Exodus, Bethlehem's children die as Jesus (the one who will accomplish the new Exodus) is taken to Egypt for safety. The cries are mirror images: Egypt weeps at Israel's liberation; Bethlehem weeps as the new liberator escapes to Egypt.