What Pharaoh Wept When His Orchard Walked Away

The day Pharaoh released Israel from Egypt, he thought he was releasing slaves. He found out later what he had actually released, and the discovery broke him in a way the plagues had not.

Shemot Rabbah, part of the Midrash Rabbah tradition compiled in Palestine around the 6th-7th century CE, reads the phrase "it was when Pharaoh let the people go" (Exodus 13:17) as the opening of a grief story. Pharaoh's senior advisors gathered around him after the departure and began to enumerate what had walked out the gates. Even if they had only the objects Israel borrowed from the Egyptians before leaving -- the silver, the gold, the garments -- that alone would have justified war to recover. But there was more. "A mixed multitude, too, ascended with them" (Exodus 12:38). Numerous wealthy people were among them. Numerous wise men. Numerous artisans. Women, children, multitudes. "Your branches are an orchard of pomegranates" (Song of Songs 4:13) -- just as a pomegranate is full of seeds, Israel was full of value that Pharaoh had never bothered to assess.

He had owned a garden and sold it for nothing. Less than nothing. He had destroyed it for generations trying to reduce it to raw labor, and when he finally let it go, it walked away carrying springs and wells and Lebanon cedar and the wealth of one hundred orchards. His advisors finished speaking. What does the midrash say Pharaoh did at that moment? He began crying: "Woe, woe." The word used is vai vai -- and the Hebrew for "it was when Pharaoh let the people go" is vayhi, which contains that same syllable of grief inside it. The midrash hears the king weeping inside his own decree.

But there was an accounting already in motion that Pharaoh could not reach by chasing Israel into the sea. The midrash from Shemot Rabbah draws it precisely. God told Pharaoh, through the pattern of what had happened: I wrote in the Torah "you shall let the mother go and take the young for yourself" (Deuteronomy 22:7). You let the fathers go -- you released the adult Israelites from their daily forced labor -- but you cast the sons into the Nile. The infants. The ones who could not labor yet. You kept the birds and drowned the eggs.

Therefore: I will cast you into the sea and eliminate you. And then: I will take your daughter and bequeath her the Garden of Eden. The daughter in question was the daughter of Pharaoh who had pulled the infant Moses from the Nile and raised him in the palace (Exodus 2:5-6). The one act of mercy in the entire structure of Egyptian oppression came from within Pharaoh's own household. And God remembered it. The man who drowned babies is thrown into the sea. The woman who saved one baby from that same water inherits paradise.

This is the theology that runs under the surface of the entire Exodus story, as the rabbis in midrash aggadah traditions from this period understood it. The Garden of Eden shouts: give me the righteous, I have no interest in the wicked. Gehenna shouts back: give me the wicked, I have no interest in the righteous. The Holy One gives each what it demands. Pharaoh stands at Gehenna until the other kings arrive to keep him company. His daughter stands in the garden.

The midrash uses an analogy that clarifies why God would keep non-fruit-bearing trees in an orchard. A king planted both kinds. His servants asked: what pleasure do you get from the barren ones? He said: just as I need fruit trees, so too I need the non-fruit-bearing ones -- without them, what would I use to make bathhouses and furnaces? The wicked have a function. They are fuel. The praise that rises from Gehenna is not nothing -- the wicked in their punishment cry out "You have judged well, you have ruled well" and that acknowledgment of divine justice is itself a kind of song rising from fire toward heaven. The praise of the righteous in Eden and the praise of the wicked in Gehenna reach God from opposite directions and both arrive.

Pharaoh wept vai vai when his orchard walked away. He pursued it into the sea. He had spent his entire life accumulating what he did not understand the value of. The orchard was always going to leave. It was always going to be redeemed. The Redeemer was already described in the book of Jeremiah: "Their Redeemer is mighty, the Lord of hosts is His name" (Jeremiah 50:34). The holder of the orchard refused to sell. The Redeemer bought it back by force. The price was a sea.

What happened to Pharaoh's daughter -- the woman who pulled the infant Moses from the Nile and raised him in the palace -- stands as the sharpest possible contrast to her father's fate. She is described in the midrash as inheriting the Garden of Eden. Her father drowned in the water he had used to drown Hebrew sons. She drew a Hebrew son out of that same water and gave him life. The symmetry is exact and the reward is proportional. One act of mercy, performed against the logic of her father's empire, earned her what no amount of his gold could buy. The Garden does not negotiate. It observes.

This is the theology that Midrash Rabbah threads through the entire Exodus: every person in the story is being weighed. The taskmasters, the midwives, the magicians, the daughter who wades into the Nile against her father's decree. Each one arrives at the accounting eventually. The wicked who cry out in Gehenna -- You have judged well, You have condemned well -- are not performing a ritual. They are recognizing, at last, what they refused to recognize when it could have mattered. The righteous who cry out from the Garden are not distant from them. The midrash says both praises rise to God from their respective places, and both are received.

The orchard Pharaoh sold for nothing will be tended by people who knew what it was worth all along.