The Mekhilta reveals a darkly ironic scene at the shore of the Red Sea. Pharaoh caught up with the Israelites camped by the water, and the Torah says he "pressed ahead." But the Mekhilta reads this phrase in two devastating ways.
First: he "pressed" the disaster to come upon him. Pharaoh's urgency was not strategic brilliance — it was the mechanism of his own destruction. Every step closer to the sea brought him nearer to the catastrophe that would swallow his entire army.
Then the scene becomes grotesque. When Pharaoh arrived and saw that the idol Ba'al Tzefon still stood — the one Egyptian deity that God had deliberately left intact — he drew a spectacularly wrong conclusion. He declared: "Ba'al Tzefon has concurred with my decree!" Pharaoh had planned to destroy Israel by water, and here was his idol, still standing at the water's edge, apparently confirming the plan.
Overcome with misplaced gratitude, Pharaoh stopped to worship. He began slaughtering animals, offering incense, and bowing down to Ba'al Tzefon. The Torah's phrase "and Pharaoh drew near" is reinterpreted by the Mekhilta: he drew near not to battle but to sacrifice — to slaughter offerings and burn incense before his idol at the very moment when he should have been questioning whether any of his gods had real power.
The scene captures Pharaoh's complete spiritual blindness. Ten plagues had demolished every Egyptian deity. Only Ba'al Tzefon remained — left standing by God as bait. And Pharaoh took the bait completely, pausing to worship the one idol that survived specifically so it could lure him to his death.