The sum reaches "more than the population of the Gaza Strip."
Rafah, May 21 - A section of the Passover Seder liturgy that in most versions of the text has successive ancient sages hermeneutically offering larger and larger figures for the real quantity of blows God unleashed against the Egyptians before and during the Exodus, appears with a different flavor in editions from areas under erstwhile Palestinian militant governance: the large figures refer instead to children who died in Israeli airstrikes.
In contrast to the traditional version, which stops at two hundred fifty, the Gaza Haggadah, by Amnesty Publishing, contains claims of tens of thousands of children, several times that, then several more times even that total, until the sum reaches "more than the population of the Gaza Strip."
The standard text counts the divinely-inflicted blows (often mistranslated as "plagues") leading to the Israelites' departure from Egyptian slavery, as recounted in the Biblical book of Exodus, as ten: blood; frogs; body lice; wild beasts (or gnats, depending on translation); livestock pestilence; boils; hail; swarms of locusts; darkness; and the death of all firstborn sons.
Since the Egyptian sorcerers unable to duplicate the lice attributed the feat to "the finger of God," and the text refers to the drowning of the Egyptian cavalry in the Sea of Reeds as "the great hand that the Lord has wielded against Egypt," Rabbi Yosei the Galilean understood the miracle there as five times more powerful, or, in his terminology, "fifty blows."
However, the book of Psalms (78:49) describes the ten blows as "He unleashed against them His wrath: anger, rage, trouble, an embassy of evil agents." Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrkanus therefore understands each of the ten to comprise four blows' worth of divine displeasure, meaning that the ten blows in Egypt in fact totaled forty, and at the sea, two hundred.
Not to be outdone, Rabbi Akiva punctuates the verse from Psalms differently: "He unleashed against them: His wrath, anger, rage, trouble, an embassy of evil agents," totaling five for each blow in Egypt, bringing it to fifty, and two hundred fifty at the Splitting of the Sea.
In the Gaza version, however, the text focuses on children dying in Israeli airstrikes, and begins with a base figure of 500. Imam Yusuf then uses hermeneutics, Hamas Ministry of Health numbers, and activist embellishments to arrive at a 34,000 figure.
Sheikh Raed Saed, on the other hand, invokes a human rights NGO principle that magnifies alleged Israeli crimes eightfold, bringing initial total to 272,000. Aqaba Marzouk takes that a step further and accuses Israel of eighty separate atrocities per allegation, taking the total beyond two million, the estimated population of the whole territory.
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