Pharaoh Fled to the Nile Each Dawn Before Moses Could Arrive

The God Who Could Not Use the Bathroom

Pharaoh had told Egypt that he was a god. A god does not have bodily needs. A god does not require the kind of privacy that ordinary humans require when the body demands relief. So every morning, before anyone in the palace was awake, Pharaoh rose in the dark and slipped out to the Nile. He went down to the river alone. He did what he needed to do in secret, in the dark, before the sun came up, and then he composed himself and returned to the palace to be a god again for the rest of the day.

The Nile was the one place he could be human. It was his private confessor, the location where the performance of divinity was briefly suspended.

Before Moses Comes, I Will Go

Rabbi Berekhya, one of the Palestinian sages of the fourth century, reports a second reason Pharaoh fled to the river before dawn. Pharaoh said to himself each morning: this son of Amram comes and goes to us each and every day. Before he comes, I will go and depart from here. He was not fleeing from Moses physically. He was fleeing from the possibility of the encounter -- from being confronted again, warned again, given another chance to turn back before the next plague arrived.

Every morning he arranged his departure before Moses could appear at the gate. The river was not only a place for private bodily relief. It was a hiding place. A private darkness where no prophet could find him before he had arranged his defenses and decided again not to listen.

God Told Moses to Rise Before Him

So God gave Moses a specific instruction that appears at the beginning of the frog plague narrative: rise early in the morning and stand before Pharaoh when he goes out to the water. The timing was the whole point. Pharaoh had been using the predawn hour as his escape route. God told Moses to be there first, to stand at the Nile before Pharaoh arrived, to close off the one private space the king thought belonged to him.

When Moses reached the riverbank before sunrise and waited, he was not simply following a tactical instruction. He was removing Pharaoh's last evasion. The man who told Egypt he was a god was going to find a prophet standing at his private confessional, and there would be nowhere to go and nothing to arrange before the conversation began.

What Hardened the Heart

The rabbis who preserved this account were interested in the mechanics of hardening. How does a man look at ten plagues and choose not to change? Part of the answer they offered was structural: Pharaoh had developed a daily practice of avoidance. He was not simply refusing Moses when Moses appeared. He was arranging his mornings so that Moses could not appear. The hardened heart was also a scheduled one. Every day before the sun came up, he fled to the river and guaranteed himself another day of not having to decide.