Pharaoh Set the Trap That Drowned His Own Army

There is a verse in Psalm 9 that reads like a legal ruling about the mechanics of evil: the nations were drowned in the pit that they made, in the net that they hid their own foot was caught. The psalmist presents this not as a hope but as an observation, something that has already happened, something whose pattern is repeatable and whose outcome is reliable.

Midrash Tehillim, the collection of rabbinic interpretations on Psalms compiled across several centuries in late antiquity, takes this observation and runs it through the entire history of Israel's enemies, naming names and connecting each one to the specific trap they built and fell into. The result is a systematic tour of catastrophic irony that the Midrash reads not as poetic justice but as cosmic law.

Pharaoh Built the Mechanism of His Own Destruction

The Midrash opens its catalog with Pharaoh. The identification requires a slight transliteration. The verse says: the nations were drowned in the pit that Esau made. The Midrash immediately specifies that Esau here does not mean the patriarch's son but is a coded reference to Pharaoh, the archetype of the nation that rises against Israel.

The logic runs as follows in the Midrash: Pharaoh commanded that every Hebrew male infant be thrown into the Nile (Exodus 1:22). The Nile was the instrument of destruction he prepared for the Israelites. But Moses was drawn from the Nile (Exodus 2:10), raised in Pharaoh's own house, and became the agent of Pharaoh's ruin. The Nile later turned to blood as one of the ten plagues. And Pharaoh's army, pursuing the Israelites through the sea, was drowned in water. The nation that was supposed to die in water drowned the army of the nation that had put them in water. Pharaoh fell into the river he had dug for others.

The Legends of the Jews elaborates on Pharaoh's calculations: he had consulted his advisors and his magicians and determined that water was the element through which the Israelites' savior would arrive, which is why he mandated the drowning. The calculation was correct; the savior did come through water. But Pharaoh's advisors had not calculated that the element he chose as his weapon would become his undoing.

Sisera and the Net He Thought He Had Hidden

The second figure in Midrash Tehillim's catalog is Sisera, the Canaanite general who commanded nine hundred iron chariots and dominated northern Canaan during the period of the Judges (Judges 4-5). The Midrash reads the Psalm's phrase, in the net they hid, as pointing directly at Sisera. He thought he was setting a net. He thought his military superiority was a trap that Israel could not escape.

The story of Sisera's death is one of the most vivid reversals in the Hebrew Bible. His army was routed by Deborah and Barak at the Kishon River, where the terrain turned against his chariots. Sisera fled on foot and took refuge in the tent of Jael, the wife of a Kenite man who was allied with Sisera's king. Jael offered him milk and a warm covering. She let him sleep. Then she drove a tent peg through his temple (Judges 4:21). The commander of nine hundred iron chariots was killed with a wooden peg by a woman while he slept in what he believed was safety.

The net he hid caught him. The sanctuary he chose was the site of his execution. He had no weapon and no allies and no iron chariots when he needed them, only the tent peg that Jael had decided was for him.

Sennacherib and the Army That Died Overnight

Midrash Tehillim adds Sennacherib to the catalog. The Assyrian king's campaign against Jerusalem in the eighth century BCE (2 Kings 18-19) was the most dramatic near-miss in the history of the First Temple period. Sennacherib had already destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel, deporting its population. He swept through Judah, destroying fortified cities, and besieged Jerusalem with an army of unprecedented size.

The siege ended overnight. The Book of Kings records that an angel of the Lord went out and struck 185,000 Assyrian soldiers in their camp, and in the morning they were all dead bodies (2 Kings 19:35). Sennacherib returned to Nineveh and was killed by his own sons. The army that had come to destroy Jerusalem was destroyed. The net he had spread around the city caught only his own soldiers.

Midrash Tehillim places this alongside Pharaoh and Sisera as three instances of the same principle. Each of these men assembled his power for the purpose of destroying Israel. Each of them encountered a reversal so complete that the instrument of attack became the instrument of self-destruction.

Is There a Pattern Here or a Principle?

The Zohar, the central text of Jewish mysticism composed in thirteenth-century Castile, Spain, frames this pattern in terms of the structure of the divine attribute of strict justice. When the Psalmist says the wicked's foot is caught in the net they hid, the Zohar reads this as describing a cosmic mechanism: the energy of destruction returns to its source when directed at those protected by the covenant. The Midrash operates with a less technical vocabulary but the same underlying logic.

The pattern is not merely that villains fail. Many villains succeed. The pattern is specific: those who organize their power directly against Israel, using systems they believe are foolproof, find that the same systems dismantle them. Pharaoh built a bureaucracy of drowning and drowned. Sisera built a military apparatus of iron and was killed by wood. Sennacherib built the largest army in the ancient Near East and lost it in a single night.

What the Psalm Knows That the Nations Do Not

The ninth psalm ends with a petition and a prophecy: arise, O Lord, let not man prevail; let the nations be judged before you. The Midrash's catalog of Pharaoh, Sisera, and Sennacherib is the evidentiary basis for this petition. The psalmist is not asking God to do something unprecedented. He is asking God to continue doing what He has already done. The pattern has already been demonstrated. The nations were drowned in the pit they made. It has happened before. Let it happen again.

The Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael, the second-century tannaitic commentary on Exodus, elaborates on the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15) with a similar analysis: every plague that struck Egypt was shaped to reverse the structure of Pharaoh's own oppression. The slavery was undone by the sea. The midrashic tradition preserved in both the Mekhilta and Midrash Tehillim agrees that the measure-for-measure reversal is not coincidental. It is structural. It is the way the universe handles those who set traps for the people of the covenant.