Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai offered his own version of the parable about Egypt's catastrophic miscalculation, and his telling amplified the scale of the blunder dramatically.
A man inherited a country-seat across the seas — a distant estate, out of sight and out of mind. He sold it for a pittance, barely giving it a second thought. But the buyer went to work, digging into the earth of that distant property, and discovered treasures of silver and gold, precious stones and pearls. When the original owner heard what lay beneath the land he had given away for nothing, he began choking with regret.
The parable tracks the same moral as Rabbi Yossi HaGlili's version, but with a crucial difference: the treasure was hidden. Egypt's failure was not just in undervaluing something beautiful. It was in failing to recognize a treasure that was buried beneath the surface, invisible to anyone who was not willing to dig.
The Israelites in Egypt were treated as slaves — degraded, oppressed, worked to exhaustion. No Egyptian looked at them and saw buried treasure. But the moment they departed, the truth began to emerge. The verse the Mekhilta cites — "What is this that we did?" — captures the exact moment of horrified realization. Pharaoh and his people suddenly understood that they had released something infinitely more valuable than they had ever imagined.
Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai's version suggests that Israel's true worth was never visible on the surface. It took freedom — the act of "digging" — to reveal the gems that slavery had kept buried.