Pharaoh Stood at Gehenna Until the Kings Arrived

Most people assume Pharaoh drowned in the Red Sea and that was the end of him. The Midrash has a different view entirely.

According to Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, compiled in the early twentieth century from centuries of rabbinic tradition, Pharaoh did not die. He went somewhere worse. He was posted, for eternity, at the gates of Gehenna (גֵּיהִנֹּם), the place of divine punishment, to serve as a living warning to every king who arrived. When the rulers of nations came through those gates, he called out to them: "O ye fools! Why have ye not learnt knowledge from me? I denied the Lord God, and He brought ten plagues upon me, sent me to the bottom of the sea, kept me there for fifty days, released me, and brought me up. Thus I could not but believe in Him."

The man who spent a lifetime refusing to acknowledge God spent his afterlife announcing Him. That is the punishment. Not silence, not obliteration, witness. He became the preacher he never was in life.

But to understand how Pharaoh arrived at that gate, you have to follow the full arc of his story, which begins not at the sea but in his own throne room, when a man named Job gave advice that shaped the oppression.

The Legends of the Jews tells us that before the great persecution began, three advisors sat before Pharaoh: Balaam, who urged the killing of the Hebrew males; Job, who stayed silent and was later made to suffer for it; and Jethro, who spoke up for the Hebrews and was banished to Midian in disgrace. Each man's choice echoed forward. Balaam was eventually killed. Jethro became the father-in-law of the man who freed those same Hebrews. And Job was visited by suffering he did not expect.

Pharaoh, left with advisors who would only tell him what he wanted to hear, proceeded. He doubled the labor. He took away the straw. He did everything in his power to grind a people into nothing. The rabbinic tradition, preserved in Midrash Rabbah, notes that even this cruelty had a divine logic behind it: the Israelites, who had also sinned, needed a crucible. Egypt was that crucible. The suffering was real and unjust and terrible, and it also served a purpose God did not explain in advance.

Then the plagues came. And Ginzberg is precise about the sequence: Pharaoh's household was struck first, before the rest of Egypt. The mixed horde of beasts descended on the palace. Goshen was untouched. A line was drawn in geography that mirrored the line being drawn in history. Ten times Pharaoh hardened, sometimes on his own, sometimes with divine assistance, because God had decided that this man would be the instrument of a full demonstration. Not five plagues. Ten. Not a partial reversal. A complete one.

And even then, at the sea, it wasn't enough. Pharaoh found comfort at the sanctuary of Baal-zephon, the one Egyptian idol that had been left standing through all the plagues. He took its survival as a sign that the gods approved his pursuit. He offered sacrifices. He charged forward. The idol that had given him hope was, according to tradition, left standing precisely so that it could give him false hope at exactly this moment.

When the sea closed, the bodies washed ashore. Ginzberg explains why God arranged this: so Israel could not imagine that the Egyptians had found another way across; so Egypt could not claim that Israel had drowned alongside them; and so that Israel could take the gold and silver from the bodies, the wealth of Egypt returning to the people who had built it.

But Pharaoh himself did not wash ashore. He sank, and was held at the bottom for fifty days, and was then brought up, not to life among the living, but to the post he would keep forever. The rabbis did not invent this out of cruelty. They were making a theological point. A man who had been shown, ten times, overwhelming evidence of God's power, and who had still returned to his chariot, that man could not simply be let off by death. His punishment was designed to fit the crime. He had refused to witness in life. He would witness forever in death.

There is a question buried in this story that the rabbinic tradition doesn't fully answer. Did Pharaoh, at the sea, finally believe? The traditions that survived in Midrash Aggadah suggest he cried out something like the words that Shirah, the Song of the Sea, contains. A last declaration. But too late for redemption, too late for freedom. Just in time, perhaps, to qualify for the post at the gate.

He stands there still, in the imagination of the rabbis who first told this story. Every king who ever decided he was his own god, every ruler who looked at a suffering people and doubled their work, walks through those gates and meets him. And Pharaoh, the man who would not learn, teaches.