Parshah Commentary

In this week’s parshah, when Pharaoh gets word that his slaves have escaped, he and his army give chase; the Israelites panic until the Sea of Reeds splits, allowing them to cross to safety. After they pass through the parted waves, the Torah tells us that “the waters returned and covered the chariots and riders, all of Pharaoh’s army that followed him into the sea, not one of them remained.” However, the idiom translated as “not one of them remained” could be read more literally to mean something quite different: “but one of them remained.” A strand of midrashic thought picks up on this reading to make the unintuitive claim that the single Egyptian survivor of the Sea of Reeds was none other than Pharaoh himself. But if Pharaoh was spared, why do we never hear of him again?

Following a Rabbinic tendency to identify minor characters in the Bible with more well-known figures—what’s sometimes termed “the conservation of biblical personalities”—the Rabbis assert that Pharaoh went on to become king of Nineveh, a large and powerful city in ancient Assyria, most famous in the Bible for the prophet Jonah’s mission to convince its sinful residents to repent. It’s a surprising suggestion, since the story of Jonah takes place at a distance of hundreds of miles and years from the exodus story. But perhaps the two tales’ shared narrative structure—a Hebrew prophet is sent to threaten a gentile kingdom with God’s wrath unless they change their ways—prompted the Rabbis to imagine that it was the very same ruler who set up shop in another morally corrupt kingdom.

This time, though, Pharaoh has learned his lesson. In fact, the midrash is introduced with the assertion, “Know the power of teshuva, which can be learned from Pharaoh, king of Egypt.” Last time, he failed to heed Moses’s warning; this time, he acts with alacrity in obeying Jonah. “Let everyone turn back from their own evil ways and from the injustice of which they are guilty,” he announces. Instead of continuing the abuse, he transitions from tyrant to penitent, emerging as an exemplar of atonement. Indeed, Pharaoh-turned-King of Nineveh precisely fulfills Maimonides’s requirement, based on a Talmudic discussion, for what counts as “complete teshuva”: “a person who confronts the same situation in which he sinned when he has the potential to commit the sin again, and, nevertheless, abstains and does not commit it because of having done teshuva.” (This might also help us understand why we read the Book of Jonah on Yom Kippur.)

Viewing the King of Nineveh as Pharaoh helps to explain one of the most perplexing aspects of the Book of Jonah: the prophet’s opposition to the people of Nineveh being forgiven. When God renounces the planned punishment for Nineveh, the text tells us that “this displeased Jonah greatly, and he was grieved,” even begging God to “take my life, for I would rather die than live” with the news of Nineveh’s forgiveness. Read on its own, Jonah’s adamant opposition to God saving human life seems both inexplicable and oddly cruel. But if Jonah is confronting Pharaoh—who has committed a genocide against his people and done nothing to make amends—and is now facing the possibility of the king getting off easy once again, his indignation and anger make perfect sense.

While the midrash may imply teshuva requires only remorse and abstaining from future sin, Jonah’s refusal to accept such repentance highlights the limitations of this model. As Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz, the 17th-century rabbi and kabbalist known as the Shelah, wrote, “It is not sufficient for a person doing teshuva to only abandon their sin. Rather, they must act in opposition to the sin they committed.” That is, we must not simply atone inwardly and avoid repeating the harm we’ve caused, but also strive to undo it through material change. If we have sinned by contributing labor to a nation ruled by a murderous regime, we should join a general strike. If we have sinned by being part of communities enabling the ongoing Nakba, we should work toward supporting return and reparations. Teshuva, at its most powerful, is not ultimately about our own ethical transformation or whether we deserve to be forgiven; it’s about our ongoing obligations to those we have wronged, and the horizon of a world where such harm is a thing of the past.

Maya Rosen is an assistant editor at Jewish Currents.