“And you shall take a bunch of hyssop, dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and strike the lintel and the two doorposts with the blood that is in the basin. And none of you shall go out of the door of his house until morning.” Exodus 12:22
I must confess that I used to imagine this activity as a rather casual matter–Dad went out to the barn, killed the lamb, returned with a bowl of blood and carefully swiped the door frame with a weed as one would with a paint brush. I no longer see it this way. The scene that God wanted to portray was one of carnage and violent bloodshed. Let us consider the basin of blood.
The word ‘basin’ in the Bible text comes from the Egyptian word ‘sap’ which is not a bowl at all, but rather the area of a door’s threshold where a person would wash their feet before entering a home. The reality is that dad did not go out to the barn to slay the lamb, but killed it in the doorway of the house. The pooled blood in the threshold was then splattered, not sprinkled (“Strike” the lintel) upon the entire door frame with the hyssop, a medicinal (healing) herb. Suddenly what we envision is not a tidy gesture, but a gory, blood-spattering affair. Needless to say the picture to the left is inaccurate.
At this point we might ask ourselves why?
Our Father would have us know that Christ’s sacrifice was not mere ceremony; not an informal and careless ritual, but an act of butchery that He willingly submitted Himself to. It was ugly and repulsive from beginning to end and no man should forget His pain and His suffering. God might say, “Look at that door through which you have passed, remember the awful carnage, and know that you need never walk through that door again.”
He Dwells -- The B'log in My Eye 